Because I feel the same

Nothing quite matches the ridiculous tumbling sense of joy I feel on seeing the Sydney Opera House and marching right up those steps. It has that sort of punchtheair excitement of I've made it!

I know it's unwarranted. Let's face it, from England, it's as easy as ABC, stepping in a metal tube, kissing goodbye to the atmosphere, and stepping out again, waving hello to Sydney.

In my defence, I can say I made it hard for myself the first time round. Fifteen years ago, in love with the younger, unmarried-to-me Dig, we slowly crawled here from England through India and China. Reaching one of the world's most recognisable, most beautiful buildings, still alive, still in love, I had a real sense of achievement.

Fifteen years a lot's changed. This time I have brought a married-to-me Dig. Two mothers dead and no telephone home this time to say Hi! Guess where we are! And kids in tow, three at once to please. Nearly half way round the world with them, and we're still alive, still married. There's an achievement too.

It's enough to set us all photographing each other. And we do, and me and Dig hold hands, and Shark captures the moment. And all I know is, some feelings don't change.

When in Sydney...

...visit the aquarium. You know it's non negotiable.

What can I add after a day of fishy fun, held only to please the budding marine biologist amongst us?

Squirrel confides in me that she doesn't find fish that interesting, and Tiger adds that she's only agreed to come for the platypus. She whispers that because Shark has recently taken to issuing death threats. She shouldn't worry. Shark is out of earshot, blissing out on dugongs.

I exit after seven hours following surgical removal of all my money but with two cameras full of blurred fish.

You may as well share the passion.






And there are plenty more where those came from.

Holding up pretty well

To spare the blushes of Dig's corporate sponsers who invited us all out to dine this evening, I'm saying nothing. Here are the ladies after fifteen vodka martinis and a tequila champagne slammer.

Can we make pizza?

I have listened to Can we make pizza? all day long. And let's say up front, even with Can we make pizza? ringing in my head, it has been a tip-top excellent day thanks to the Australian National Maritime Museum.

Squirrel has asked Can we make pizza? everywhere. Including on board the Endeavour, the Australian-built replica of Cook's ship berthed in Darling Harbour, and which is such a fantastic slice of living history Grit would lick the deck if only she had not been pursued by Squirrel asking Can we make pizza?

And Squirrel has not given in. She has asked Can we make pizza? while we have contemplated Aboriginal art, early explorers and settlers, French and English maritime history and the sad, sad journeys of migrant children, sent from orphanages in England to make new lives in Australia, and how Grit was moved to tears over that, and still the question Can we make pizza? goes on.

Can we make pizza? goes on even while we are walking across Darling Harbour, seconds after Squirrel has suggested the thing she would like best to do in all the world is shove me in the water after I have told her off for asking Can we make pizza? all day.

Following some discussion about how you strategically approach those in charge to get something you want, of course I cave in and say YES! LET'S MAKE PIZZA! and we go directly to Coles supermarket, buy mini pizza bases and tomato paste, onions, cheese and mushrooms, and from then on it will be simple. We will go back to our rented apartment and compose pizza.

I need to remember to seal my face in concrete and jump off Harbour Bridge first.

Perhaps it is the dramatic tension of the day's build up to this delicious feast. Or perhaps it is the catharsis of the actual pizza making. Because there is a bloodybigboohooing from start to finish from just about all of us.

Here are the pizza bases, smeared with an assortment of onions, tomato paste, mushrooms and cheese. In varying amounts. Squirrel has slightly more cheese, Tiger has no mushrooms, Shark has extra onions. Only they all look the bloody same when they come out the oven, sparking a furious row called That's NOT my pizza!

Dig complicates matters during batch two by arriving half way through and assembling two of his own pizzas, thus fuelling more That's NOT my pizza!

Then the extractor fan makes things worse by dropping off the ceiling into a tray of carefully assembled pizzas waiting for cooking.

If only it could stop there. On removing a tray of mini pizzas from the oven, I upend them on the floor because the only means of extraction I have in this slightly under-resourced apartment, are the burned fingers of one hand and a soup ladle. Cue more weeping and more pizza making.

The final batch go in. The oven is now caked in charcoal pizza goo and raging at 240C when the unhinged Grit opens it, stares directly inside, burns out her corneas and sets the fire alarms off.

Seriously, I wish I could make it up now because with the children screaming behind her, the blinded Grit blunders out the kitchen to throw open the balcony windows and not fall fifteen floors down in a vain attempt to stop the fire alarm BEEPBEEPBEEPING when the phone rings.

Dig steels himself to explain to reception who by rights will be calling to check whether the fire alarm is real and should they call out the fire brigade and charge us $1000 for the privilege? But no. It is the reception calling to say they would like to come and change the beds. Not the sheets, note. The entire beds. Frame, mattress, the lot. And by the way, do you need the fire brigade because we can hear the fire alarm? And is that a woman screaming AARGHICANNOTSEEEE! Is it a medical emergency, Sir?

Tomorrow, Dig's hosts are taking us all out to dinner. I expect our behaviour to be exemplary.

Short on time

That's the end of the family holiday. This week Dig is working in Sydney, which means I am left to my own devices. Plan A is to locate the nearest museum and spend all day in it. I won't need Plan B.

Home Education Plan A is the Powerhouse Museum. Here I can send Shark, Squirrel and Tiger off, roaming free, and need not see them again.

When I want to find them later this afternoon I'll look for the security guard. He'll be frowning with impatience and jangling keys. In front of him will be my kids, squaring up to pick a fight about the unfair treatment, actually being thrown out of a museum when they have not yet designed the teapot in the interactive design game, and does everyone know how much they've been looking forward to doing that?

Then I'll be caught between feeling proud of my little home ed school, and needing, for the sake of social niceness, to sound apologetic for them all at the same time.

Well, Powerhouse, I'm not really apologetic. I've been kicking myself all day because I forgot the camera. And I'm short on temper thanks to a husband snatched from my grasp. And we only found that kid's gallery in the underground level an hour before closing. You should have made the design section more boring. And you shouldn't have distracted us with that space capsule. And what's with the clock? We spent a good half an hour looking at that.

So what did you expect? Take an awkwardsquad mama and three bolshy kids deprived of papa for the week, put them somewhere they like, then try and throw them out of it, fifteen minutes before closing time.

You'll find the security guard in the cupboard at the back of the soundwaves section.

Port Stephens to Sydney.

Driving around Australia is a bad idea. We won't do that. I will plot instead for when the kids are aged 18 and living in squats in Kensal Green. Then I will spend the inheritance driving round Australia with Dig, exploring what is over there.

Because the problem we have right now is possessing more kids than car windows, which means they have to sit in a line.


After an hour, Tiger says she does not like sitting in the car looking at views like this.


She doesn't say this quietly, unless I count quietly as kicking the back of the car seat screaming her guts out while snot is pouring everywhere and it sounds like iiiiiwannnnaaagetoutthecaaaaaaaaaar! I guess I will call that quiet, because it is no where near as bad as that time on the Oxford ring road.

Anyway, Dig says he cannot drive when someone is having a fit in the car, quiet or loud. He has a yell and I fine Tiger $1 on her spends for causing a public nuisance, on the basis that if I stood in a public street and screamed I hated pavements, I would probably be fined too.

But we will not dwell on the car journey. It is a necessary evil, so I can take away memories of what children really like to do on a beach holiday.

Blame the weather

This morning in Port Stephens the rain has constantly hammered on the metal roof of the cabin. Thunder has rolled around us, rattling our cage, literally.

At first, it wasn't so bad. The children found the Star Trek Warp Speed Ball wrapped in plastic in their Kellog's pack. This provided a half hour's amusement. No-one reads the instructions, so they play randomly with it, hurling it about the room. Then a fight breaks out. Dig sends Squirrel and Tiger into the covered area where the rain finds small cracks in the roof to drip, and they wrestle there.

Bored with that, Tiger finds a snail and suggests timing the speed of its track with the Speed Ball, and that amuses everyone a while until the snail won't go where they want, won't jump over the finish line, and anyway, no one thought to measure the distance. Then they disperse in search of another, more willing and obliging insect, one who will follow rules and obey commands.

Of course the moment their backs are turned, disaster strikes when I stand on the snail while occupied with the laundry again. I won't confess. I will say their only source of amusement slithered off, weary of being told what to do by giants.

And the owners of the site aren't here again, which is a great nuisance. They would have provided some diversion because the children could have quizzed them about what type of snail it was. When Squirrel and Tiger found another frog, the owners stared at it blankly, before declaring it a frog and they didn't know what type. They're not much use, beyond declaring this is a koala, this is a kangaroo, but hey, it's raining, and they would have provided another half hour of something to do.

For me it's bad because they keep a little second hand bookshop in their office and now it's all locked up. That makes me feel cross. They are a good source of reject books about English history.

And I still cannot make the huge laundry machine work. Cherry, the site owner, managed it for me the other day, or said she did, by changing the settings. I cannot do the same. I told Dig to stop pressing STOP and START because everytime you do that it fills with water. Now we've overflowed it again. Perhaps it's a good job the owners aren't here to see us kill their wildlife and trash their laundry hut.

Midday, it's continuing to rain, and none of us really knows what to do. I have tiptapped at the keyboard, we've played with the Chinese chess set, no one wants to watch TV (which I am glad about) and only Shark can be persuaded to draw a picture of herself in a very special Australian place. She's chosen the Shark and Ray Feeding Centre.

The children respond much as anyone would expect. They are bored, fed up, squabble. We've periodically ejected them into the dripping covered area outside and told them to squabble there. They wrestle, try and turn it into I hate you and never want to see you again, then try and turn it into I didn't mean to hurt you and I'm sorry. They are rolling back and forth, not sure which way to go, not sure which route to take. When the rain eases, they dart off to the grass and the ponds and stay there, even though within minutes the rain comes tumbling back down.

This is not kind weather, so I feel sorry for myself, perhaps that this part of the journey is over. I have come to new resolutions of course. I don't know if I'll see any of them through.

Perhaps we can yet redeem the day. The weather's due to clear before we're plunged into darkness at 5.30, and we may make a dash to see the gigantic sand dunes around Anna Bay, in the Worimi Conservation Lands.

The sand dunes stretch 32 kilometres round the coastline and are shifting slowly inland. So far they've made it by one kilometre. The dunes, reaching 40 metres high, lose all their vegetation beyond the coastal strip and become sand mountains straight from a film set. Cherry says they are the largest dunes outside the Sahara. I'm not sure about that, but they would be fine to see. Probably once there I will realise how much I don't know about the world all over again, and how much time I squander, when there is so much to explore.

After the English fields I've crossed, this is a cinch

Hey! We're bushwalking! Doesn't that word conjure up some image. I bet you are filled with expectation that we're strapping forty litres of water to our backs, donning hats with corks and setting off thataway, walkabout style, temperatures 40C in the shade. We may live off grubs for the next seventy days, and if I don't come back alive, you can bet I had fun going.

Bushwalking round these parts also seems to mean stroll a few hundred yards uphill on concreted paths to a summit. Here you'll find a wide and sturdy platform to take your photo opportunity. Tomaree Head Summit Platform to be exact. 160 metres above sea level, commanding panoramic views of Port Stephens.



This walk up the park is a regular weekend thing to be doing for some exercise and there's troops of folks trudging up and down. The kid in front of our party is springing up barefooted.

But this doesn't detract one bit from my pioneering exploratory soul and I take full advantage of my knowledge that I am actually bushwalking, so can freely imagine myself gutting skinks and digging out Wittchety grubs. Yup, I do.

I do, also, take advantage of the splendid photo opportunities afforded by the excellent and sturdy summit platform which can easily accommodate twenty-plus overweight tourists wielding heavy duty camera equipment.



A satisfying day. Next I may try the Sturt Desert if it has a boardwalk.

Shark falls in love

We probably travelled several thousand miles for this experience.

Because we're all in it together

We all fall out with each other.

Not me and Dig, obviously. We piss each other off low level everyday. We don't keep the heated passion for monumental chuckingcrockeryatwalls-type falling out. This form of anger the kids reserve for each other.

Not Squirrel. She is exempt today, and keeps her own council while she dodges bullets. Wise.

We suspect the arguments start because Tiger is homesick. Her homesickness, her missing love for a lost cuddly snow leopard, doesn't manifest as a sad face and the expression, I'm homesick. Not at all. Her sadness is manifested by hurling blunt objects and sharp words at Shark.

Shark, unfortunately, woke up this morning with a single purpose of returning as much of that misery as possible to everyone and anyone, including the koala. This is not because she is homesick. This is because she is aged nine and still learning on which side her bread is buttered.

But today Shark, we want to take you dolphin watching, and every time you come up with that smart answer back, we delay that dolphin watching experience a little while longer to piss you off in return for pissing us off. This is not because we are homesick. This is because we are mean, bolshy parents who wouldn't mind a bit of acknowledgement that you are loafing about Australia instead of strapped to a local primary school desk staring at black and white photos in a geography text book.

The morning proceeds pretty much like low crossfire for an hour or so, with the kids needling each other, while me and Dig try to keep the lid on what we're really feeling in that very British parent way, even though we would oh so much like to give everyone a good clip round the ear and a slap on the bum. But we do not. We say things like That is a very rude and disrespectful thing to say. A slap round the arse would convey that feeling of outrage so much quicker.

Eventually of course we do make it to the dolphin watching boat ride round the harbour of Port Stephens, where the sulky behaviour more or less continues, except this time Shark's beginning to suspect she might just be thrown overboard, so better keep her mouth shut in case mama goes berserk and has what she calls 'an elastic band moment'.

Anyway, I'm ignoring it now. There are some 150 bottlenose dolphins living it large in the harbour, or so we're told. We manage to find about six of them, to be told they are doing what dolphins do when they are asleep, that is switch half their brain off, come to the surface of the water and breathe before switching brain sides.

Shark has lashed herself to the front of the ship like Captain Ahab and she is not giving way to anyone, not nobody, not ever, because she is damn well seeing those dolphins if it is the last thing she does right now on this earth. If she does not see at least six dolphins I am taking the captain of that craft into hiding for his own safety.

Tiger is not at all thrilled by this experience and spends most of her time complaining that Shark has given her the camera and a death threat. She says Shark has told her to take pictures or else. But the dolphins are non-existent, and if she did not exist then she would not have to take pictures of non-existent dolphins. We say do not be silly and give the camera here. At the great upgoing shout of excitement with the first sighting of the non-existent dolphins, Tiger switches tack and says she is not allowed to photograph the non-existent dolphins now because we say so.

Squirrel is caught in the middle of this misery highway and is infected by the sheer weight of this depressive cloud. I feed her biscuits surreptitiously as a reward for having to put up with us all, then I push off for my complimentary cup of wobbly tea. Dig drinks beer.

There is only one solution to this intemperate time when the dolphins have been watched and Shark threatened with a seat on an aeroplane home rightnowthissecond, and that is to make to the beach.

Strangely, everyone is made happy here, sculpting islands and boats with one seat and other solitary constructions from sand, and we all do this quietly on our own patch until the sun goes down, the tide comes in, and we walk home in the dark.

On the fumbling way home in pitch blackness, the Inland Revenue in Scotland telephones Dig on his mobile and threatens a penalty charge if he does not pay immediately the outstanding sum demanded from him two days after we left England.

That is OK says Dig. But first, I am on a family holiday. And second, everything else can wait.

Love it and hate it

Yesterday's storm passed. I can get on with matters of staring at a koala's bum and finding Australia beguiling and irritating both at the same time.

Irritating, possibly, because we are stuck on a limb at the edge of nowhere. With darkness, which falls at 5.30 each afternoon, all visible life disappears. The shopping mall five miles away shuts up, the roads fall silent, a solitary night fisher takes to the beach, the koala shifts between one buttock cheek to the other. And while this might be blissful for a short time, Grit is a goodtime girl fresh from Hong Kong. A little cultural variety wouldn't go amiss.

I am not exactly a city girl but here I am, finding myself frustrated in search of street life and alternative culture. Down at the shopping mall, discovered this morning, it's all neat and ordered and homely and uniform and everyone dresses like it's 1989. I suddenly yearn for those rich varieties of street people providing a dash of chaos to ignite the unpredictable. And I wouldn't mind some uproar and noise along with that confusion and disorder.

But most of what I miss right now is news. Any news. Except discussion on whether school league tables should be published in New South Wales. Didn't we start that issue in the UK 20 years ago? Or how some bloke is leaving one woman because another woman will have him instead. Clearly nothing's happening in the world. With hope, I could turn to the women's pages, where I can be instructed in how to be as lovely as lovely mothers and cook biscuits.

So some might use expressions like lonely parochial outpost with insular attitudes cut off from the rest of the world. But that wouldn't be fair.

Australia is wonderfully, intensely, beguiling. Possibly because we are stuck on a limb at the edge of nowhere. And I'm not giving up hope of doing that walkabout. I feel the urge. I just want to point in that direction and start walking. I don't know why. I can't explain it. You have nature to yourself. All this immense energy and mystery all around you and if you set out in that direction, you'll be connected to it and lost forever. All that landscape to explore, to know and realise it will never be known, the huge depthless vastness of it, the deserts, mountains, valleys, wide lands of nothing in nowhere. I want to see it all, be in it all, and it starts right here.

With time on my hands while Shark, Squirrel and Tiger track tree frogs and jump in and out of the pool, I make it my sole purpose in life to sit at a picnic table with a beer and muse on whether I could settle down and live in Australia, or whether it would prove too much and I would long to move on and find another place.

I don't have an answer. I watch a koala bear eat five eucalyptus leaves for dinner, scratch a furry ear with a foot, fall asleep in the fork of a branch and never look in danger of dropping out the tree.

Did you say we spend a week here?

I knew if I waited a few hours I would find out what is wrong with this place.

First off, we are living on a reclaimed swamp. Hence the tree frogs, who think it still is a swamp. And the mosquitoes, who have chewed off both my legs and are starting on my arms. Squirrel is slowly inflating in all directions. Her legs looks like weird balloons with measles.

And there are other disadvantages. Like in Australia it is autumn. And they don't ponce about with changing clocks back and forward like in the UK, just so the tourist class can loll about lawns in evening sunshine quoting Auden. None of that crap. There's nothing but dark round here at 5.30pm so that's your lot, mate. And then again, being autumn in Australia, it has done nothing but piss rain on me all day long.

After three hours locked in a tin cabin with CanwegotothebeachCanwegotothebeach reverberating between my ears I do what any person driven mad by constant whining of triplets locked in a tin cabin would do, and that is mount an escape attempt with laundry.

I leg it out the door, through the attack lines of mosquitoes and quaking thunderstorm carrying armfuls of soiled clothing.

Having achieved my objective of reaching a laundry hut I discover more pain. I cannot do the washing. I can make neither machine work and the owners to the site aren't here. There's a notice pinned on the door with an emergency telephone number. Calling to say I have covered my clothes in laundry powder might not be the type of emergency Australians respond to warmly, so I lug it all the way back to the tin cabin again, discarding knickers on the way, and with the rain pelting me in the face like this time it means business.

By lunchtime I am quite desperate. We have had eight fights and one near miss on a black eye. This is clearly Australia's fault. They have made such an outdoor culture for themselves with all that bronzed surf and bush stuff that everyone seems to have forgotten to provide anything sensible to do indoors at all. The British are good at indoor amusement like Monopoly, charades, and parlour games because we spend our lives imprisoned in the front room. And providing a life of field tramping in mild British drizzle for the gritlets means we are poorly equipped for proper Aussie rain bashing. Worse, I realise now the little grits have developed no inner resources and have lost the playing cards donated by British Airways.

Thus at 2pm I foolishly cave in to the constant demands to go to the beach and shout Yes! we will go to the beach!

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger clamber in the car. I admit that. I would rather burn up the ozone layer than rot to death in the 500 yard walk through the torrential downpour.

Life had clearly become desperate for all concerned. Two minutes later the gritlets are scampering up the river path to the beach and throwing themselves in the sea fully clothed before embarking on building a scale sand model of Jericho with three Hong Kong yogurt pots and a spade that has appeared from nowhere. And for the next two hours the rain pours down upon their oblivious heads.

I would very much like to make my escape at this point. Stupidly I do not. I stand on a ledge under a roof overhang of the surf hut (locked) which provides 12 centimetres of cover. Here I part read A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. Since I am standing on a ledge two foot off the ground in the pouring rain contemplating a week's thunderstorming beach holiday with children in a tin hut where the world blacks out at 5.30 prompt, I can truly say at this moment I fail to see the funny side.

By 5pm things are looking worse than ever. To bribe the little grits off the beach I suggest I drive everyone to the shopping mall to buy sweets. I know this is off-the-scale demented but two hours on a ledge does this to a woman.

The roads are totally dark. I have no map. I do not know where there is a shopping mall. I am driving a car missing a pedal and it has no gears. The rain is tipping down and the wipers cannot keep up. Naturally, I drive at a speed of a one-legged echidna on a road with an 80 km speed limit trailed by fifteen pissed off Australians.

On the plus side, I note the koala had pushed off this morning. I am assuming it is not sick to death of listening to the constant references under its tree to its idle ways and fat arse but because eucalypts do not provide good shelter in thunderstorms. Thus I plan to go native and start observing koala behaviour as indicative of weather systems. This resolution provides a strong sense of place and is strangely satisfying.

Here is the ledge.
I drove back after the storm passed just to take a picture of it.
I have developed a strange emotional bond with this, and the koala.

But I am quite difficult to please

So, while in Hong Kong, Dig finds this place in Port Stephens. He books it last minute on the internet. It's either this or the layby on Highway 1.

Let's see how you did, husband.

Because while we're all sitting outside eating breakfast, Shark eye-spies a koala bum hanging lazily from the tree right over our heads. As it slowly shuffles along a branch, that sort of disproves my theory the owner has nailed a furry cushion there, unless he's got it on radio control.

Then it's time to walk around the site. The swimming pool's small but heated and Shark, Squirrel and Tiger run off to change. Not before they squeal in delight at the tree frog, butterflies, tiny scuttling lizards under the fallen leaves, and the lorikeets and rosellas squawking overhead.

Don't be too long in that pool, we caution, because you have to walk the ten minutes to the beach and say hello to the kangaroo who lives in the backpacker's campsite over the road. Then we have to pop into Port Stephens to check out the dolphin watching cruises and find the opening times for the Shark and Ray Centre fifteen minutes down the road and for which Shark would sell me as a galley slave should I be foolish enough to put up any resistance to that experience.

Then of course there are the sand dunes, sparkling waters, vineyard and tonight's barbecue to cater for. Dig feels it's part of his duty to take that over and he wouldn't want to disappoint anyone, so I can relax while he cooks dinner.

Let's just say, husband, for now, I'm reserving judgement.

Counting the cost of Qantas

It is a two and a half hour drive from Sydney airport to Port Stephens. Just as well we leave eight hours to complete that route. Really, we could have done with twelve hours to park the car and pass out properly at the roadside rather than behind the wheel.

It's not that things went badly. They just went without any sleep at all, thanks to the Qantas flight of doom.

So at 7am on this Sunday morning, Dig is standing only by means of his skeletal structure propped up against the Thrifty Car Hire desk at Sydney airport. He has no consciousness at all, having had that removed somewhere over Darwin. This makes it comparatively straightforward for a Thrifty woman to extract several thousand pounds from him including his life savings and a promise of 25% of all future earnings in exchange for a week's hire of a dark blue car, make of which completely passes me by.

Picking up the car sets the day off nicely. It's an automatic, so we don't know how to drive it. Dig presses all the buttons and levers and tries to find something to do with his feet. He may as well hang them out the window to amuse the kids who are falling into a full scale war in the back driven by lack of sleep and madness. Tiger is chanting Mummy needs a poopy as we kangaroo the wrong way out the car park entrance with the attendant shouting slowly behind us, Sir, it would help if you took the handbrake off.

From that, all else follows. We have no idea how to get out of Sydney. We have no map, or at least we do, but the navigator, whoever she is, does not discover it in the glove compartment in front of her for 40 minutes. We have no food or drink and in sixteen seconds of finding Highway 1 the consequences of starvation, sleep deprivation and madness burst forth in nuclear war on the back seat.

So we make a slow and juddering journey to a week's beach holiday based in Port Stephens, travelling an average of two miles an hour thanks to being handicapped by a handbrake permanently on and no clutch, a driver who is unconscious for most of the journey, a navigator off her face with lack of sleep, and triplets punching each other about the head over who has moral rights to be a snow leopard.

At least we have the gratification of seeing this sign at one of many laybys we become familiar with, heading north.

Hello Qantas. Shall we talk about PAIN?

Like the moment the cabin steward came round to stick needles under my fingernails and beat me about the head with a spanner?

Or did I just dream those moments? Like they are indistinguishable from the reality of torment? For which read the overnight Qantas flight from Hong Kong to Sydney.

But before I recommend everyone out there grab a donkey and use that because it's a darn sight better than becoming a Qantas customer, I would just like to put in a word of praise.

But hey, bear in mind I was young and foolish. Travel was an exciting thing and the huge enticing variety of air experience lay ahead of me, so twenty years ago flying with Qantas was an experience that, although not up there with the likes of Cathay or Singapore (who handed out fresh orchids), then Qantas was rough and ready and entirely serviceable and no messing about, and I quite liked that. Like they say over the tannoy no sleeping in the aisles because that is what the Aussies probably do when the aisles present a practical solution to a problem, but I welcomed that and warmed to it, probably because I felt their heart was in the right place and the steward handed Dig a full bottle of wine. And I mean a real bottle, not these poncy miniature millilitre plastic bottles everyone hands out these days.

But something has gone deeply wrong.

Deeply, badly, wrong. Qantas, you should have owned up to the few minor problems on this flight. And then we might have forgiven you the horrible errors of your ways. Like the routine way we discover there is no online check in for our flights, so every time we turn up for Qantas we have to leave a good two hours just to stand in a check in queue.

And then you bloody well knew about the problems on this flight and never had the courtesy to admit right up front it was all arse about face. No. You made me suffer. And for that, you sink to the lowest of all airlines and now sit right down there with TAP.

OK, where shall we start? We had a warning, when we are standing on the beach at Lamma, and Dig takes a call from Qantas suggesting we agree to be bumped, so long as we can get on an early morning flight leaving in less than 12 hours. Now if you are facing the idea of waking up sleep deprived triplets at 5am to be dumped in Sydney a day before your accommodation and car are booked, facing the prospect of walking into a hotel to pay rack rate for two rooms with connecting door, then the offer starts to look less attractive than it might.

Should we start there, or with the additional hour spent sitting around waiting to collect one boarding pass? Qantas woman says they cannot let Shark on the aeroplane. Better leave her in Hong Kong.

When she finally returns saying oh yes, you can take Shark to Australia with you, our mistake, here is the boarding pass, she then adds, casually and smiling, like people might add, And did you know your wife is having an affair with a horse? Or, Your car has now exploded because I have pressed the detonator, that By the way, all the visa information submitted for all your passports is WRONG and you will be turned away at Sydney immigration. Have a nice day.

Dig may stand there with evidence in his hands to prove everything is RIGHT, but now this is no concern to Qantas woman. If five minutes ago there was an issue with Shark, now it's the entire family they have screwed up. But strangely there's no need to worry. Just hurry along, because if we detain you for ten minutes more you might miss your flight.

Oh that might seem like luck. When we chain ourselves to the seats on board, everyone discovers the on demand video system doesn't work. Now I am not particularly intuitive but something tells me they knew it wouldn't work, knew it never had a chance of working, and yet even used a straight face to suggest vaguely someone might fix it. Hmm. I didn't know engineers could fly several thousand feet in the air, unless you keep one on board. Well for lying, Qantas, to disguise your failure, you sink right down there, straight off. If you had been honest and said right up front, OK, we fucked up here, we haven't got any kid's video, we haven't got anything by way of entertainment, and guess what? We don't even care about your kids! then I sort of could have forgiven you. I sometimes feel the same, but that's because I'm a parent.

But should I go on? Like, if you fly Qantas, please take your own food. The vegetarian mush shoved at me was possibly one of the worst meals in aviation history. The one with some indistinguishable brown goo, a bread roll and a banana. But a side order of salt? Did you omit the potato by accident? Why not inject that salt straight into my children's brains next time? You would do your job of killing us all with hypertension so much quicker.

But then the whole script was wrong, Qantas, WRONG. Like you straight off suggest we all buy duty free. I should have taken up that offer, ordered a bottle of scotch and anaesthetised my brain so I wasn't conscious to witness you throw inedible food at me, then leave it to abuse me for an hour before coming round to ask if I need a drink. Hey! At least I got asked that question! Dig was missed out entirely and had to suck his own feet. Then again you do have your impish ways, like removing my cup and only then asking if I'd like tea.

Of course this litany doesn't cover all the small and painful miseries we all endured. Like the oppressive heat in this cabin. Perhaps you were just trying to cook us all and serve us to the next flight to shave a bit more cost from the inedible meals service. Or the convenient way my overhead light doesn't work. Or after two hours in I was frantically pressing the call button and pleading for the cabin lights to be dimmed so I could try and sleep and imagine myself elsewhere.

But at least this one has sky in it

Somedays I feel someone took a pair of scissors to my life, chopped it up into bits and gave me back a jigsaw. I can't piece it together. Key pieces don't fit. And I am sure I lost some under the sofa.

Grit's jigsaw pieces, the fragments she usually holds, are all about education against the odds, worry and loss, handling triplets, distributing banana sandwiches at 70 mph, getting lost, wiping up snot, serving hard boiled eggs, making ends meet, staying alive, and tramping across an English field in rain and mud persuading herself that she is making the best of a bad job.

I like to imagine one day there'll be a whole picture and it will add up to a lump of grit that turns into a pearl, because if it doesn't Grit will always be nothing than a shard of grey grit that is just like grit in your eye or in your shoe. A bit of bloody irritating thing that isn't going anywhere except sluiced down the storm drain and off to the local water treatment to skulk for the rest of eternity in an effluent pipe.

But then there are the other jigsaw pieces I'm handed. Ones which don't fit, and they are Grit's life when she is with Dig. Dig leads an entirely different life from Grit. People around the world ask for him; he's honoured and feted, treated with respect, is invited to meet government ministers, royalty and Melvyn Bragg. Last time I looked, he had a Wikipedia entry. While Grit is scratching about in a field grubbing up some life lesson, Dig is wined, dined and head hunted.

Which is partly why we are in Hong Kong, so I'll admit that much.

And because this week I am with Dig, and our hosts want us to have a lovely time, my jigsaw pieces have been an escape from my ordinary life; I have been dined in good grace, transported round by taxi, brought to apartments, dined some more, showered with advantage, shown the benefits of Hong Kong life, dropped into property agents, reassured there is no problem with the home ed options, the lifestyles, the bookshops and weather. And when we are all left alone at night I've shared Tiger's whispered fears about what her cuddly snow leopard might think, because he is frightened by typhoons.

Well, as we approach the end of our time in Hong Kong, Dig says he's not making any decisions just yet, because his freedom's not for sale and he won't grace anywhere more than a year. I can consider myself lucky then. He is, you know, not interested, unless everything's on his terms, because he is basically a free creative spirit with a world vision and he is not swayed by a house on a hillside, a shedload of cash and a Hermes handbag. Not at all. Dig is principled and good and not at all corruptible and has absolutely no interest in Chanel or anything like a pair of Jimmy Choos. Nope. Don't even mention those to him, because his free soul is not for sale, and I do agree with that. Oh yes I do, even though I would in all honesty like that lifestyle on Lamma Island and that Chanel handbag very much.

Where is this leading? I don't know. Probably to another jigsaw piece that doesn't quite fit if it leads to those rooms with a view over the beach of the lotus eaters.

Rooms with views.

The Lamma Island hippie set take to the herbal tea garden...

before spending their last few Hong Kong hours on the beach.