Well, here we are up-side-down in Australia! We've been here a week now and not seen a single temple although, if you look very carefully, you may spot a Buddha in one of our photo’s!

Rosie, Steve and Beatrix all got up at the crack of dawn on 16th August to greet us at the airport, and how fabulous it was to see them all . The combination of our luggage, Steve’s car full of drums and Beatrix’s car 'pod’ meant that we ended up with two cars to carry us home! Bea had apparently been a little serious whilst waiting at the airport but immediately picked up on the excitement when we arrived and was all laughs and smiles. Ever since our arrival here, she has not seemed at all phased by us appearing into her life and is quite happy to be passed around and cuddled by all and sundry. She is such a happy-go-lucky little character, who is definitely on the road to teething and is having a chew on everything, especially everyone else’s fingers and thumbs if they are within her reach! She was 5 months old on Saturday and is growing rapidly.

The afternoon of our arrival day Steve was playing a Blues gig, so we all went and had a very jolly time (see video below for both Steve and Bea in action!). The first set was Steve solo, singing, playing guitar and drums, followed by a set with two other guys playing guitar and mouth harp (mouth organ to those in UK) . Blues seems quite a big thing here in Brisbane (possibly in whole of OZ?) and when they started to invite other people up to play, saying ‘Jimmy, do you have any harps with you? Come and play something’…..’Colonel, do you have harps with you? Come and play’…I realised that there were probably more ‘harp’ players in this room than I had encountered in my life before. Yesterday we went to the ‘Sunday Session’ again and this time they had ‘Mojo Webb’ up to play with them. I don’t know that he’s any relation of mine (my maiden name being Webb), but you never know! Steve plays a lot of gigs with Mojo and we’ve heard about him many a time, so it was good to hear and see him for real!

A couple of days after our arrival it was my birthday and I requested a picnic by the sea as my special treat. We went for a long walk along the seafront from Redcliffe to Scarborough. It was lovely and sunny, but just a little too windy for our picnic, which travelled back home with us! For tea we went to Doug’s café for fish and chips. This is tradition, as it’s what we did last year for my birthday! However, when they brought our food to the table it was in take-away bags and they told us they were closing in 10 minutes and gave us the impression that they didn’t want us hanging around their café when they wanted to go home! So we took our fish and chips home too! The next day we went to New Farm Park and ate the birthday picnic, whilst wondering what on earth the tree was that had lots of huge potato-like things hanging from it . We tried to find it on the internet but just found someone else’s photo with the caption Magic Hawaiian Hanging Potato Tree’, which we like but suspect is not the real name. I’m relying on Jo and Rob, our nature experts, to come up with identification for us, although I think they may be relatively rare in Nottinghamshire.

Our culture for the day (other than the potato tree) was a visit to The Powerhouse, an arts centre by the river converted from an old power station and retaining a lot of the industrial stuff. As well as the obligatory coffee, we viewed an exhibition of people in Afghanistan. The guy kept being approached by people saying ‘Axe me biggie’ (take my photo), so on this particular day he went out with the aim of photographing 100 people on the streets with the same minimal backgrounds. Lots of extraordinary ‘ordinary’ people with only a few holding Kalashnikov rifles.

Our test for the week was the day that Rosie invited around two friends with their children, total now = four children, another of whom is also called Beatrix (or Fake Beatrix, to distinguish her from ours, the genuine Beatrix) . It was Fake Beatrix’s first test at being left with Rosie (and the rest of us - good plan Rosie!) for half an hour whilst her mum went off for a walk, to start getting her used to being left with other people. This went ok for most of the time. There was only one real crying session! Asher, the three year old, was very handy with the dustpan and brush but seems to have put it away in a very safe space and we have all spent days looking for it, even when we don’t want it, just because it must be here somewhere!

We’ve had a few technology problems here. We discovered that our international multi-adaptor does not take our bathroom-type plugs. We have visited every electrical type shop we can find, none of which had a suitable adaptor. It has been particularly sad seeing their looks of disappointment as they confidently lead us to their stock and we wearily tell them that we have one of those and it doesn’t fit. This is usually followed by the assistant removing the adaptor from its packaging and looking crestfallen as he realises that we, despite only being pommies, are actually correct and the query, ‘are these plugs common in England?‘ One place just looked at us and said ‘Dick Smith!’ We obviously just looked back at him blankly, not understanding what this meant but have now discovered this is a chain similar to Tandy. We visited Dick Smith’s but they couldn’t provide us with the goods either. They sent us to JayCar, an electrical component shop where the guy said that he would just break the adaptor a bit it and force the plug in! Tony took a more refined version of this advice and pared away the edges of the holes and managed to insert the plug so we are now able to clean our teeth with the powered brush . (big smiles!)

Rosa kindly provided us with Oz Pay-as-you-go SIM cards to make calls cheaper whilst we’re here. However, we then surprisingly discovered that both of our phones were locked to Orange. We paid a price and got them unlocked, put credit on the cards and after a few hiccoughs were away. However, in the process I somehow managed to completely wipe all my contacts from phone and SIM, so I am now in the process of trying to build these up again. We transferred Tony’s contacts to my phone but I then ended up with hundreds of his old work contacts. I tried to ‘mark several’ in order to delete them in one go, but it would only let me send messages to several, not delete them! And, of course, there are contacts that I had and Tony did not have in his phone. Ho Hum!

Generally, we’ve taken it quite steadily so far, had a few walks, done odd bits of shopping, learnt the specialist technique for getting Steve’s car started (turn key and hit steering column!), and spent lots of time enjoying being with the Rosie, Steve and Beatrix. We have another week or so here and then we pick up a camper van for a month travelling up the coast to Cape Tribulation and back. This destination was suggestion by Jonathan (my brother) as being one of the loveliest places he has ever been, and everyone we mention it to seems to agree with him. We’ll let you know!