Monday, December 5th .....

Well, it’s official, we’ve passed the criteria and are now classified as ‘rural’. The first two criteria were easy: our property is too big to kick a football from one side to the other, and we drive a perpetually-dirty 4WD, but the last two eluded us for a while.

We could have got a goat to keep the grass down or Marilyn could have joined the CWA and learned to bake lamingtons but they seemed a bit extreme. And then, as if by chance, we met two criteria on consecutive days.

Yesterday, we bought a chainsaw. Nothing (except perhaps a shotgun) epitomises ‘rural’ more than owning and using a chainsaw. I must say, we felt good and the local fire department will applaud our attempts to keep the property free of dead branches.

The last criteria was met this morning when I woke up to hear the farm cat, CB, yelling about something in the laundry. She sleeps in the laundry each night but has a cat flap to get in and out. Her yelling was to tell me that she had brought home a gift for us: a dead baby rabbit.

I couldn’t believe our luck, the fourth criteria, that the farm cat brings home prey bigger than a mouse, had been met.

So now we are rural. We have to learn to talk more slowly, wear a big hat, take our political views from Barnaby Joyce, show interest in the price of fat lambs, and wait all week for Macca on a Sunday morning. But, it’s worth it. No section of the Australian population has more leeway to whinge and complain. Now, if only I can work out a way to write off our overseas trips as farm expenses.

We decided we would treat ourselves to lunch yesterday. We went to a little restaurant in Gravelly Beach called Kouklis, ostensibly Greek but something for everyone. Jamie had Spanakopita, Marilyn had Fish Cakes with a Greek Salad and I had a Sicilian Fish Stew. Each time we do this we promise it will become more regular but it never does. The restaurant is just a few doors along from 303 Gravelly Beach Road, the holiday house we once had. It looks out over the river to Swan Bay so our current house was almost directly due East. As Jamie said, if we had a boat we could sail across for lunch and save the long drive around through town.

It’s just 9 o’clock here, the sun is shining and there’s not a cloud in the sky and all we have to look forward to is another day cutting down grass. I’m going to spray some roundup on the piles we laughingly call rockeries, and Jamie will get the chainsaw going – just another day in paradise.