Tuesday, 25th January …..

Tomorrow is Australia Day and already the flags are staring to appear in people’s gardens and on their cars. We had our celebration a couple of days early with a barbecue yesterday for a couple of old colleagues from Giant Steps, and their wives. Since I left, Tim has been appointed Assistant Principal, and Rod is moving on to a new position after three years as teacher in Red room.

We wanted to do something a bit different so organised the menu as a series of small entrée dishes before the main course quite late – something like a tapas menu.

We started with some simple green prawns on skewers, cooked on the hot barbecue plate and served with a choice of lemon mayonnaise or thousand island dressing. There were only enough prawns to give each person three or four but it was easy to see who had more than their share when we counted up the discarded skewers on each plate.

Second entrée saw skewers again, this time with a mushroom and a couple of pieces of capsicum cooked on the barbecue. I rubbed the mushrooms with oil and salt and added some honey mustard just before serving. Fantastic!

Third course was chipolata sausages, beef and chicken, served with sweet chilli sauce, and the final mini-dish was marinated steak, sliced and served on turnip mash with fresh dill.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it and we had to delay the main course to give our appetites a chance to recover. However, there was no-one who refused the scotch fillet steak, lemon-marinated chicken, sautéed red onion, and fresh peaches rubbed with oil and brown sugar and grilled on the barbecue. We had new potatoes with sour cream and a Caesar salad as well.

Dessert was a platter of fresh fruit and cheese.

We are lucky in Australia to have such an abundance of good, fresh food and the culture of taking the best of other national cuisine to produce an imaginative and healthy diet of our own.

We’re still house-sitting but Siaren comes back from the Philippines on Monday and we’ll be able to resume our caravan travels. At this stage we plan to head south to Hobart and beyond. Years ago, we camped at Recherche Bay in the South-West National Park. In the 1800’s more people lives south of Hobart than north, but over the years the area has become virtually deserted. The only large-ish town there now is Southport but you can still find remains of houses, hotels and railway lines in the bush. Our books tell us that it’s safe to take the caravan into the national park over a dirt road and a bridge restricted to 5 tonnes but we’ll probably leave the caravan at Southport and take the car on from there so we can check it out.

I remember one bridge from the last time we went (which must have been about 1977); it consisted of two ancient tree trunks, with railway sleepers lying across them. We were with a few other vehicles so everybody piled out while the drivers tentatively inched across not knowing whether the whole contraption would crash into the creek below. Maybe a new bridge has been built since then but we’ll need to check it out before I take the four tonnes of car and ‘van across it.

One other memory of that trip is how sick we were after eating what they called periwinkles collected from the rocks. Some of our party had canoes and brought the shellfish back from rocks out in the bay. They were cooked on an old piece of iron over an open fire and we vomited all night!

Monday, January 17th …..

It’s true that more gets done when you’re busy. Certainly, very little has been done on the blog in the past three weeks while I’ve been involved in almost nothing.

Currently, we are ‘house-sitting’ for our friend, Siaren, who has gone back to the Philippines for the summer holidays. She was married in September but has had to leave her new husband there until his application for a visa to come to Australia is approved. Siaren, of course, had to return to Australia to work after the wedding. She tells us that she and Jan have rented a small apartment while she is there so they can enjoy each other’s company and start their married life without having to worry about other family members tripping over them.

Siaren adopted our cats when we retired and took on the nomadic lifestyle so we were quite happy to look after her house and feed the cats while she was away.

The days just slip away. Marilyn is using the time to recover from her knee operation and I have been re-building my ebook library in my new Sony Reader, and doing some minor chores around the house. We’ve also been able to catch up on some TV series we have on DVD. Monk is a favourite at the moment and we’ve just finished the first series of Dexter.

We wander into Launceston occasionally, checking out all the bargains to be had in the New Year’s sales. We’ve supplemented our cruise wear although we certainly had enough to go on with. Still, having the right shoes for the pool and a spare pair of shorts won’t be a disadvantage.

A colleague from Giant Steps was married last weekend, coincidentally on our anniversary. He has married a Filipina, from the southern island of Mindanao and we enjoyed their garden wedding in his father’s house in Relbia, a rural part of Launceston. Tim’s father was a farmer in the area but most of the farm has recently been sold off to developers. The day was very hot but we found plenty of shade and had a very pleasant afternoon.

I’m writing this episode of the blog on my desktop computer which I had left with Siaren to look after. Unfortunately, my little netbook has been ‘playing up’. Fortunately, it decided to expire just a fortnight before the warranty expired. This is contrary to my usual pattern where the warranty expires a fortnight before the item decides to conk out. The netbook has been returned for repair so I hope it will be back before long.

The TV has been full of the dreadful floods in Australia, particularly in Queensland but in other states as well. Even in Tasmania, we’ve had a number of houses inundated. One of our friends in Deloraine came home to four feet of water around his house. Luckily, the living quarters are up high but the garage and workshop was totally immersed. It’s the third time in five years and he’s fed up with it, so as soon as the place is dried out and memories fade, he will put it on the market. There’s such a demand for houses in Deloraine at the moment that some retiree from the mainland will snap it up. I wonder if the real estate agent will be honest enough to point out the likelihood that they will eventually get wet feet.

Sadly, I heard from our friend Kit in Calamba that there was an attempted robbery at her house last week and, in the melee, her security guard was stabbed and died. When we travel to the Philippines and stay with Kit we always feel safe because of the security measures she takes. It seems now, though, that you’re never safe.

In my search for interesting books to load on to my ebook reader, I came across a book called The Good, the Bad and the Unready by The Rev Robert Easton. It’s an irreverent look at famous (and infamous) people of history who have acquired nicknames. Some are wonderful: Elizabeth the Red-nosed princess, King Charles the Silly, Wilfred the Shaggy, and so on. Rev Easton admits that his childhood nickname was Robert the Ridiculous, and dedicates his book to someone called Harry the Dirty Dog.

He also drops in a comment that Private Eye magazine in the UK uses nicknames when talking about the Royal Family. The Queen is called Brenda, Prince Charles is Brian and the late-Princess of Wales was Cheryl.

Very little has been organised for the next week or two. We plan to be out of here by the end of next week and back in our caravan for all of February. Hopefully, our lives will become more interesting then and I’ll have more material for more regular blog episodes.