TRAVELLING

It was 8 years since we went to Australia for a year, just as spring was getting underway which was fabulous for us naturally we were flying from England just as autumn was gearing up. Spring gave way to summer and by the time Canberra autumn began in about April and by then we'd had a complete year of weather admirable only for celebration with the bbq grills. What we were not prepared for was the winter which was savage but odd. During the day the sun would raise the temperature to twenty degrees and at night it fell to anything down to -5 with a bitter wind that blew down off the Snowy Mountains that sit to the south between Canberra and Melbourne.

That xmas we had a villa at Jervis Bay on the New South Wales coast with a gang of chums where we had xmas lunch cooked on a gas barbeque in the pouring rain. For New Years Eve we were restored in the Australian Capital Territory and on New Years Day we drove up to Sydney for a short break and on the 2nd I met up with an old friend who was on holiday and we travelled to the Sydney Cricket Ground for the 2nd days play of the final Test. By this time it was all up anyhow, the Aussies were already 4-0 up and England were staring the prospect of a whitewash. Worrying times.

Despite that, we had a superb day. We saw Alec Stewart become the 3rd top Test career scoring batsman, Steve Waugh was breaking Allan Border's aggregate for the most games as captain of Australia in Tests, and that afternoon he beat Sir Don Bradman's record of 29 Test centuries, though as we know the Don did it in significantly fewer matches.

In the evening, we almost did something that won't usually happen in the English language and for dinner chose to go for a German. The menu of pork, potatoes and cabbage won't usually figure much in the choices but eventually we ended up in a pub which had a massive charcoal barbeque in the centre of it and punters brought their own meat to the bar with them and they threw it on the bbq grills for you and then you paid for chips, salad or veg. It was superb and in fact quite common in Australia, but the charcoal barbeque was normally situated outside.

Something else which is common and is I believe Oz's foremost gift to world culture, is having a betting shop housed in the pub too. This is because most Oz towns other than the capital cities are in fact so small that they are required to double up in jobs and because it has to be the identical rules whether in town or country, this means that you can stop at the butchers, go to the pub and get a wet while your food is being cooked on the gas barbeque or charcoal barbeque and get a wager on the next race while you're eating it. And when the dishes are clear and if you haven't lost all your cash, you can get a six pack of beers to speed you on your way home because the pub might have a bottle shop (off licence) attached as well. Your enthusiastic reprobate can only have a better day if someone passes him to the remote control to the pub's television.