Just a few weeks before Anya came along we went out with a friend-of-a-friend and photographer, Ann Nidrie, to get some photos taken of ourselves in the bloom of late pregnancy.

It was a beautiful day, as she describes on her own blog. The only slight downer was that, while posing for images of us lying together amidst ivy-like ground weeds, I managed to lie straight in some dog crap. The positive way of looking at this is that (1) it produced some good pictures (2) at least it was me rather than the expectant mother who ended up with poo on his jacket and (3) there's got to be a culture, somewhere, where lying in dog crap, like being shat on by a pigeon, is some perverse mark of good luck.

Anyway the pictures were beautiful so I thought I'd put in a link to the full gallery here.

Her full name

I'm just registering our beautiful daughter's birth today, so we've finally decided on a middle name.

We're going to call her Anya Mayrah Fickling Mackenzie, which would be great in Scrabble. Here's the backstory.

'Anya' is a Russian variant of 'Anna', which derives from the Hebrew 'Hannah' meaning 'graceful'.

We waited until she was born before deciding on it definitively, but as soon as we saw her we knew she was definitely an Anya.

'Mayrah' is an Aboriginal word, meaning 'spring wind'. Typically, Australian baby naming books and websites just say that a name is Aboriginal and leave it at that - which, given the 600-odd Aboriginal languages and dialects, is a bit like saying a name is Eurasian.

But I can see the difficulty of working these things out, given how patchily European Australia kept records of this country's indigenous people before it drove most of them away from their culture and language.

As far as I can see, 'Mayrah' first gets mentioned in English in 'Australian Legendary Tales', an 1890s collection of Aboriginal stories by Katherine Langloh Parker - the full text of the story it appears in is here.

She lived, and seems to have collected her stories, around the Narran River in northern New South Wales, close to Lightning Ridge, where the main clan was the Yuwaalaraay. So I'm going to go with that. Read the rather lovely story to get a better context for the meaning.

As for the surname, we both like our own surnames and didn't merge them when we got married, so we're going to give Anya both of them, unhyphenated in the Spanish fashion.

Kate likes 'Mayrah' so much that don't be too surprised if you catch her using it as a first name from time to time.

Poosplosion!

It's one of babies' four main activities alongside eating, sleeping, and weeing, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that pooing is one of Anya's most impressive skills. Today, she's been doing overtime. Babies are meant to  be able to fill six to eight nappies a day and she's doing her best to beat that record; no sooner have I changed her (I'm trying to do most of this, on the principle that Kate handles inputs so someone else should look after outputs) than she wriggles her legs up, grimaces, and does a big farty sound which inevitably means a filled nappy.

Parents have various names for the more dramatic episodes of this activity. "Poosplosion" is a popular one among our friends; today's behaviour feels more like an apoocalypse.

The scariest thing to happen on election night

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="640" caption="Anya's feet complete with oxygen monitor"][/caption]

As far as we were concerned, it wasn't the prospect of Bob Katter holding the future of Australian politics in his gnarled hand, but Anya's decision to stop breathing.

First things first: she's absolutely fine now, which is why we're out of hospital and I'm currently typing this in bed with her lying in a bassinet beside me wriggling and whimpering and yawning.

But her decision to stop breathing in the early hours of 22 August was, understandably, one of the most horrible moments of my life. Here's what happened.

After the birth we were moved into a double room where Kate was struggling to get sleep. Our roomie, on the far side of a couple of curtains, was a Thai woman whose Australian husband had a vast extended family which trooped through in huge numbers during every minute of visiting hours; outside of visiting hours, she was on her mobile phone to her own friends and relatives back in Thailand. That meant that it was impossible to get sleep during the day, and also impossible to get sleep at night when I was kicked out of the hospital and Anya started squeaking and mewling until Kate cuddled her.

48 hours in and we were moved to the heaven of a single room, where I was even allowed to stay the night. But Kate had still barely slept, so when Anya started crying again I took her off to the tea room to settle her and sleep. We slept for a while but she went on grizzling so I took her off for a relaxation bath in the ward bathroom (floating in warm water is great for settling babies - they almost forget that they've emerged into this horrible dry cold world). That went pretty well so I changed her nappy, wrapped her up, and started heading back to the tea room.

Now I hadn't managed to wash my hands in the bathroom as there wasn't a handwashing sink in the room, so on the way to the tea room I wheeled her bassinet over to a sink opposite the nurses' station to wash my hands there. I'd barely started soaping my hands when one of the nurses called out: "She doesn't look right!", and swept her up onto a recovery table in a small room just three steps away.

In the few seconds when I'd been washing my hands little Anya had stopped breathing and turned quite blue, and immediately there were three or four nurses around her giving her oxygen, checking her pulse and breathing rate and trying to get a measure on her blood saturation using a laser device that attached to her foot and made it glow like ET's index finger.

After that is was all a bit of a blur - Anya quickly went pink again but the nurses and doctors kept on taking measurements and watching her; I woke Kate; and we all went down to the special care nursery, the lowest of three levels of intensive care for newborns and preemie babies.

Anya stayed down there for five days, including two days in the high dependency unit, the next level up before intensive care.  The staff informally called her scary moment a "dusky episode"; more formally, it was labelled a "desat", or "desaturation". This because when she stopped breathing the oxygenation of her blood would drop dramatically, lowering the O2 saturation you'd normally expect to see from 90%-100% down to 80%, 70%, even occasionally below 60%. The ET foot probe was measuring this factor, and it showed that in the first few days down there she was having several desats each day.

There were several possibilities that were looked at, tested for and ruled out as causes for this. An early possibility was an infection - her belly button looked a little red when she was moved down, and she was put on a course of sweet cherry-flavoured oral antibiotics which she found absolutely yucky. But some blood tests showed that wasn't the case. There were also concerns about an anatomical problem in her trachea or heart, but x-rays of her chest and ultrasound scans of her heart and head ruled out any problems there.

This left the most likely and most common cause of such desaturations: a fairly simple coordination problem. In all of us, a single throat splits into a windpipe and an oesophagus which are carefully kept separate from each other. When we breathe, our oesophagus is closed; when we swallow, our windpipe closes. This is a pretty useful skill to stop ourselves from choking on our food and sending it down into our lungs, but it's not always smoothly there from birth. Anya seemed to be choking longer and more frequently than she should have been; the only solution, the doctors said, was to wait for her to get the hang of it.

For the first few days she continued to have occasional desats, so they took her into high dependency where she was put into an incubator and on a drip for 24 hours. Whether it was the timing or the environment, that seemed to do the trick - after a day there she'd had no more dusky episodes and was moved into a normal bassinet again; and after 24 hours more there she was allowed to move back up to the postnatal ward with us.

Obviously we've now got a spiffy movement monitor in her bassinet because we're ultra-cautious about her breathing, but she's been fantastically energetic and vigorous ever since her time in special care. During, even: the nurses said that during one desat when we were out of the ward, they had been trying to remove a dummy from her mouth but her suck was still so hard - even when she wasn't breathing - that they'd needed all their tug to pull it out.

She's just sat next to me now having a feed and is thriving. She put on 110 grams in three days after moving out of hospital, which is a bit like me putting on three kilos in as many days; when she's hungry, the vigour of her scream is proof positive that she's having no trouble getting air into her lungs, or out of them.

Belatedly, introducing Anya

The photo gallery is here. The YouTube channel is here.

Anya Fickling Mackenzie was born at 11.46pm on Thursday 19 August at the RPA Hospital in Camperdown, Sydney, weighing in at 3.12kg (she weighs pi! Does that mean her circumference will ALWAYS be her diameter times her weight?) and 48cm long.

After giving us a bit of a scare when she was but two days old, she is doing really well, eating like a Bavarian woodman, crying like a supermodel who's lost her iPhone, wheezing and snorting and sneezing like an emphysaemic old man, and pooing like ... well, only babies can really poo like that.

Birth story and other tales will update here later. Right now, she's having a snooze on my chest all bundled up in a sling, but she's starting to grizzle so I'll have to post this before we get a scream.

So it's been wet in Sydney over the past month

Really, really wet. Wetter than any sort of wet you get in Britain. In Sydney, when it rains hard the roads become rivers and you can't walk five metres in the rain within being soaked. On Friday, I crossed the road for a sandwich at lunch, got caught out on the way back, and when I was changing out of my work clothes at home six hours later they were still damp.

Want an illustration? How about this:

Do your own Attenborough voiceover

I think I once wanted to be a nature filmmaker. Can't remember what happened to that, but on my 34th birthday, I finally shot some footage of a cool animal.

This is a Victoria's Riflebird and it came onto our verandah every morning where we were staying in Lake Eacham, north Queensland. It was trying to impress the ladies of course, but they were more interested in our breakfast scraps. Love can be hard.

On cats and kids

I was having lunch with a colleague today who has an 18-month old kid. We got onto the subject of tantrums, and how parents should respond to them and the ways in which parents can be responsible for them becoming acceptable behaviour (my colleague was saying he tends to be quite hyperactive around his daughter, so perhaps she expects a certain baseline energy level out of any situation and needs to amp it up to get attention).

Kate and I of course have absolutely no idea what we'll be like as parents. I'm extremely laissez-faire by nature, and am pretty determined not to be prescriptive or judgmental (aren't all soon-to-be parents?), but of course it seems that when kids get to the testing-boundaries stage a huge amount of that is thrown out of the window because the little sweeties are JUST DRIVING THEIR PARENTS MAD.

The argument my colleague was making was that the seeds for this are planted in the behaviours you teach kids from the year dot. And this made me wonder a bit about Jasper.

Kate raised Jasper from a kitten and he was about two when I came along. And if human owners have the same role in shaping a cat's personality as in a child's, we're going to be in for a ride.

Dear Jasper. He's a loving and affectionate beast, never happier than when nuzzling our hair in the morning or waking up from a nap as we come home. He will act standoffish and he's not averse to the odd nip, but he is a companionable beast who likes nothing more than hanging out with his humans. But let's face it, he's pretty much the feline equivalent of a teenage delinquent.

Calm followed by unexplained flashes of aggression; acting out in front of people to express jealousy; absolute dummy-spitting over his food, using wheedling, violence and persistance to get his way; it's all in there. And I can hear a parental tone in the way we always add: "But he is the most gorgeous cat, and we love him."

Anyway, hopefully I'm overdoing the analogy. One thing that strikes me is that he's particularly tantrum-ey at present because I think he is pretty aware that something is awry in Kate's hormones. I think he's smelling all sorts of things that are unsmellable* to humans that indicate he's about to be supplanted. Another is that he is incapable communicating properly with us. I think one side of a tantrum comes from frustration at the sense that one isn't getting the empathy one needs; for a cat, that feeling must be constant.

*Why isn't there a word for smell to go with visible, audible, tangible? I'm going to try to invent "oleable", so imagine you read "inoleable" there.

Music time: Susan Cadogan

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend who has a beloved dog called Lola. Anyway, she was on Australia's answer to Desert Island Discs a while back and chose The Kinks' "Lola" as the song to play herself out to.

I found this endearing, and was slightly disappointed at the thought that if we wanted to enshrine our cat's name in song, we'd have to turn to this sort of thing.

But it got me thinking about songs I love, and about songs I'd like people to know I love because they mean a lot to me and make me happy and I want to share the love.

Of course, it is so like a boy to be making lists of songs he likes. But WHATEVER.

This is 'Nice and Easy' by Susan Cadogan. It would be on my desert island playlist because Kate loves it so much and it makes me think of her. Also, it's quite a weird song in lots of ways. Susan Cadogan made pretty much one single album in the mid-1970s with some Jamaican dub and reggae producers. In that sense I think she was a bit of a manufactured act, but she did have this amazing, ethereal voice and the Pete Waterman to her Kylie was Lee Perry, who brought out the weirdness of her singing with some too-much-echo ghost-train dub atmospherics.



Two other things about Susan Cadogan. The fun fact is that she's now a librarian at the University of the West Indies in Kingston. How cool would it be if your university librarian had a hit with Lee Perry?

The other thing is that we saw her at the Jazz Cafe in London a few years back. It was an odd experience in a number of ways. I've occasionally thought about writing fictional short stories about people entangled in different ways in the music industry, and this would have been perfect material.

The concert was basically brokered by the Mad Professor, a dub producer who's also become a bit of a svengali of the touring revival reggae scene - he's also the person who digs up Lee Perry every summer to wheel him around the summer festivals. The Mad Professor had produced a new album for her, which was I think more or less her first since the 1970s, and Kate got a signed copy at the end. Essentially, it felt that he'd produced the album as a favour for her, and out of respect for what she'd done. There really didn't seem much commercial imperative - it was a one-date tour in London from Jamaica, with a tiny Jazz Cafe audience, so probably lost money.

Susan Cadogan herself had some great stage presence and the same fantastic voice, but shorn of Lee Perry's stylings the stuff she was singing was really pretty run-of-the-mill reggae and lover's rock. Which, given the fact that she's approaching 60 and hasn't been making music commercially for the best part of three decades, is probably what you'd expect (and for what it's worth, lots of people who *have* been making music for three decades end up playing run-of-the-mill stuff; in fact, that's the result more often than not).

I don't really know the point I'm making with that. I think it's probably that it's best to leave some heroes preserved in the aspic of distance and memory. Susan Cadogan was a good performer and she clearly loved what she was doing, but that song from 1975 is something unique and almost timeless; by comparison, the live performance felt a bit like really, really good karaoke.

The naming of babies is a difficult matter

So obviously Kate and I are trying to work out baby names.

This is easier said than done.

For one thing, you have to work backwards from a surname. Tricky because (a) we've always wanted to keep our own surnames, and (b) 'Fickling Mackenzie' is a hell of a mouthful. And has more 'ck's than a posh pants shop.

But we've got over that and it's starting to work as a surname for me. Coming up with a first name, however, involves more treacherous waters. Principally that we've had the wind put up us by our friends Tom and Sandy, who are due to have baby in about a fortnight, saying you should never tell your friends baby names because they'll always have known someone at school called x who they hated, or they'll remind you that Justinbieber is already taken and it's not really a girl's name.

So to put people off the scent we've come up with a shortlist of fake names. In fact, in the endless task of sorting through likes and dislikes in online baby-name sites, I think I'm arguably being more successful coming up with dumb fake names than I am at coming up with proper real names. Does that make me a bad father? Already?

Anyway, any prospective parents in the same situation are free to use my current shortlist:

Chamwow

Marky Mark

Umberella

Bennifer

Movember

Ring II

So on Easter Monday Kate, Dorani and I went up to the Blue Mountains for a walk. As is the way with these things, we took a good while getting ourselves together: getting a picnic together, driving up there, buying a meat pie. And the first thing we did was go to see an Aboriginal rock art site which involved a boneshaking drive down a dirt road for 30 minutes each way; the rock art, while unusual in the Sydney area because it involved ochre hand prints, wasn't that amazing if you've seen some of the proper stuff around Uluru.

So finally we headed out on a walk that was meant to go along the side of a creek to a pool in which you could have a dip. After a steep descent into the creek gully and a scramble through about 50 metres of vegetation-choked shore, it became apparent that the path had long been washed away and that the fittest rambler would need to do a bit of swimming to complete the route. Given that Kate was about 20 weeks' pregnant at that point, there was no way we were going on so we stopped to catch our breath.

Well I was probably overinfluenced by reading The Wild Places late last year because I decided the trip would not be wasted if I had a little dip in the creek. The water was still as glass where we stopped, teatree brown and dappled with eucalyptus light dropping down from the edge of the gully. So I stripped down to my cossie and slipped in from the edge of a rock.

No sooner did I hit the water than I felt a lithe, lightning movement from the second finger of my left hand. My wedding ring! I peered into the water but it was all stirred up from the splash when I'd hit the water. The ring was definitely not on my finger. So odd, and frustrating, to actually feel it come off! If I was the superstitious type to believe in water sprites, I would have been convinced they'd hustled it from me. For several minutes I peered fruitlessly at the bottom trying to find it, but it was late in the day and we had to get home.

The next Saturday I hired an underwater metal detector and went back, armed with a snorkel and mask and some neoprene boots. Metal detectors these days are pretty smart: this one could tell the difference between different metals just by the sound, so I was quite optimistic about my chances. Wrongly, as it turned out: the first telltale squeak from the detector turned out, after much digging in sand and silt, to be a crushed drinks can. The second, which was very persistent indeed, was a 60cm piece of iron tubing; the last one was a copper pipe-joint. But no ring. Presumably, in the intervening week it had buried itself so deep in the silt that the detector could no longer pick up its presence. Either that, or it really was the water gods, getting back at me for not making a more modest offering before jumping in.

Cutting the UK's deficit - not so hard after all

There's a spiffy interactive graphic on the FT's site giving you the opportunity to act as chancellor of the exchequer and decide which bits of the UK's budget you'd cut so as to balance the books.

One of the things that strikes me after playing around with this is that, considering these issues are all "third rail" ones for British politicians (ie, as with train tracks' third rail, "you touch it, you die"), I didn't find it very difficult to make the necessary cuts. I realise that no politician likes to go out during an election campaign and say unpopular things, but given the level of doom and gloom about the impossibility of Britain ever balancing its budget I was quite shocked how easy it was to win at the game. (That may be because it's only asking you to save £44bn, rather than the £100bn-odd you'd need to eliminate the medium-term UK deficit without faster-than-expected growth or higher-than-expected taxes).

Anyway, it's a fun thing to play around with. The choices are, I guess, a lot easier for me because I'm just some schmo sitting at his computer playing prime minister, rather than a party leader with fellow MPs and advisers and interest groups and voters to worry about. But here's what I went for:

• Ringfence schools and hospitals spending (quite a big handicap, given how much of the budget they eat up)


• 2.5% levy on public sector pensions (yes, there will be angst, but they're absurdly generous compared to what the rest of us will ever get. This long-term liability alone risks toppling the whole budget - and if you can't bite that bullet now in this rather limited way, when can you?)


• Cut public sector jobs to reduce pay bill by 7% (Not an easy one, but this would come mostly from a hiring freeze. Again, everyone is having to freeze new hiring at the moment, and it's not like you couldn't raise it again in future. The police, to name one area of the public sector, are absurdly overstaffed in my experience with them)


• Means test child benefit and disability living allowance (As someone who could in theory be drawing child benefits in about four months time, I still think it's a waste of money. I understand the hallowed principles behind social insurance and non-means-testing, but I think all benefits really ought to be safety nets for the poor, not handouts to the middle class. I can't see why a childless person on £10,000 a year should be subsidising a with-child couple on a combined £100,000 a year)


• Cut police and prison population back to 1997 levels (the police are, like I said above, ridiculously overstaffed and the prison population is a social problem in its own right that should be cut even if it didn't save us money. We shouldn't be putting so many people away. This probably is a bit of a third-rail issue - imagine the gyrations of the Daily Mail during a police strike - but I've got some backup plans, see below)


• Cancel building two aircraft carriers (why do we need these? I mean, seriously?)


• Cut armed forces personnel by 25,000 (ditto. We should drop all this nonsense about being a second-tier power. What are they for? Defending the Turks and Caicos islands?)


• Stop school building for three years (I used to cover construction, and the contractors are making a mint out of the schools building programme. What matters is teachers, not buildings, and if it's only a question of delaying a programme in the grip of a fiscal crisis then I think we can handle it)


• Cut spending to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by 10% (I presume this refers to the transfers under the Barnett formula, by which some of the UK's poorest boroughs in England subsidise richer ones elsewhere. I'd probably keep the spending in Northern Ireland for the sake of both peace and general deprivation, but if it hastens the push for independence by Scotland and Wales - seriously, Wales? - bring it on)


• Withdraw concessionary fares for pensioners (as with other benefits, this should be means-tested)


• Delay Crossrail for 3 years (no one expects it to be built on time anyway)


• Halve spending on road maintenance and upgrades (if it makes driving less attractive that's no bad thing)

I realise there's some politically risky stuff in all that, but there's really nothing that I could see making life much harder for the worst-off in society. If anything, most of the cuts rebalance spending by cutting elements of rich welfare and the law 'n' order 'n' military side of the budget. All that said, there's not such a huge amount of fat there that I'd find it easy to cut much deeper.

OK let's get this started again

I've been a bit absent from this blog for a while. No particular reason - just that blogs are habit-forming, and not blogging is also habit-forming.

So please press here to watch the blog restart:

This is just weird.

He's done this a couple of times in the past few weeks. I have no idea what kick he gets from it - maybe the porcelain is cool against his belly. Or maybe he just likes to get a rise out of us.

Australia's property bubble

There is a huge and angsty debate in Australia at the moment about whether the country is in the grip of a property bubble or not. One of the most prominent real estate bears in the local blogosphere is walking to the top of Australia's highest mountain next month, as punishment for losing a bet with a more bullish counterpart about the direction of the property market. Most mainstream commentators (such as the great Ross Gittins) seem to think the current boom is sustainable and reflects the fundamentals.

I don't have nearly enough expertise and knowledge to challenge that position yet, but there seem to me to be an awful lot of very clear warning signs that something is awry in the market:

• Loan multiples are at truly scary levels. I can remember the anxious headlines in the UK in 2006 and 2007 when Abbey started lending out five times the principal borrower's income. In Australia at the moment, the most cursory mortgage search turns up a host of lenders offering seven times joint income, ie up to 14 times principal borrower's income. And this is in a country whose GDP growth, inflation and interest rates are traditionally substantially higher than in the UK, so that over-extended borrowers will be much more vulnerable when interest rates return to more normal levels, let alone if they overshoot.


• The range of mortgage products on offer looks like UK circa 2007, or Florida circa 2006. Commentators routinely state that "Australian lenders don't make subprime loans". They do, however, have lots of self-certified loans, where you don't have to prove your income and pay a higher interest rate as a result; non-conforming loans, where the borrower's credit history is patchy and again commands a higher rate of interest; and they do often combine these products with low introductory rates which disguise the real cost of borrowing. Whether Australian lenders name these products subprime loans or not, they have exactly the same features that made subprime loans so risky.


• The attitude of consumers is distinctly frothy. I was in a bookshop the other day and had a look at the real estate titles in the personal finance section. With the exception of a lone book from the "For Dummies" series, literally none of the titles were plain guides aimed at explaining the complexities and pitfalls of the real estate market to ordinary homeowners. They were all "How to become a property millionaire in six months" or "Secrets of real estate tycoons" - ie property investment guides, not property buying guides. The imbalance is what stands out: if the "investment" view is so much stronger than the "place to live" view, then people are likely prepared to take on bigger risks (such as a 14x income mortgage) because they're convinced rising prices are a one-way bet and will bail them out of whatever debt they take on.


• The normal arguments trotted out by the bulls seem, to me, to be based on classic bubble logic: that we haven't had a property crash in years so we must have somehow escaped that cycle; that *current* homeloan default rates on mortgages are fairly low (as they were in America in 2006); that demand from population growth is outstripping supply (as it has in Britain for the past two years). And they seem to utterly ignore the importance of mortgage finance in all of this, ie that if lenders start raising their credit standards, as they did in Britain in 2008, prices will not be able to maintain their level. To me it's quite telling that decent information on mortgage credit standards is extremely hard to come by, and not closely watched.

This doesn't mean that the whole thing will collapse tomorrow. Unlike the UK, for instance, Sydney has already experienced a real estate slump from 2003-2007, so the current hot market is in some ways just making up for lost time. But price-to-income ratios are still among the highest in the developed world, and it's genuinely quite scary to see the sorts of loose lending practices that proliferated in the UK and US before the crash being embraced wholeheartedly in Australia, with very little concern about where this will lead.

Of course, we have a vested interest in prices coming down, at least to London levels. The nicely-done up two-bed house next door (in a suburb pretty much like our old neighbourhood of Hornsey, and in a city where the median income is about $37,000) just sold pre-auction after about a fortnight on the market for $820,000. Our incomes (well - Kate's current income and my expected income) are much higher compared to median incomes than they were in London, but the level of indebtedness that most people seem prepared to take on here means that at the moment we could easily be outbid by someone earning half as much.

That makes one think that maybe it's time to just bite the bullet and pay more than you would normally think you could afford. And of course, it's the moment that the arch-sceptics like us start thinking like that, that asset price bubbles tend to burst.

The Quickening

OK so it sounds like the title of a really bad horror film (in fact, I've just discovered that it is), but it's still a great term. It's that feeling that mothers get about four months into pregnancy of their baby starting to move around, and Kate's been experiencing it for the past week or so.

At first it was hard to read what this was. Pregnancy does hellish things to a woman's guts anyway, so amidst all the heartburn and indigestion and what have you it's hard to pick out the significance of turbulence from a baby foot stirring up the amniotics. In the early days Kate was pretty convinced that it was probably just a bit of banana smoothie that was stubbornly refusing to digest properly, but now she gets a little flutter several times a day, and it's consistent enough that it can't just be reflux. She says it feels like bubbles fizzing away in her stomach at the moment.

This is particularly wonderful because it's like a constant daily reminder that the pregnancy is progressing well - and also that the baby is inheriting its parents' fidgety tendencies.

From the desk of Mr Jasper: latest infamy!

I am reasonably happy with the living conditions in my new house. But I have uncovered a fresh plot directed against me - I believe the humans are trying to poison me.

That seems the only reasonable explanation for what happened to me earlier this week. On Monday night the female human got back from her trip to Queensland and we had what was in most respects a pleasant and civilised evening: they sat on the sofa talking and eating, I found a cockroach in the kitchen and pranced around playing with it. I have to say, as playthings they are perhaps even better than mice and baby birds; their stamina makes them worthy adversaries.

But after they went to bed I was racked with an unfamiliar pain. I started feeling tired and sickly and hot, so I took a quick nap in the hallway where the wall is cool. When I woke up there was some disgusting discharge weeping out of my eyes. I was so horrified that I went back to sleep again.

When I next awoke it was light and I was still feeling groggy. The female human was leaning over and peering at me, talking in a worried voice, and the male human came and had a look too. I tried to get up but was feeling a bit sore about the stomach, and I didn't really feel like eating. The female was saying something about how it was very unusual for me not to wake them up at 4am by sitting on their heads and that I would normally be crazed with hunger by this time in the morning. The male one made a telephone call and then went out; when he came back a few minutes later I heard him banging around in the back of the house, and no sooner had I realised what was going on than he swept me up and put me in that infernal cage that always comes out when bad things happen. I was feeling too weak to protest.

They carried me out to a car and drove me to a big building where a disgraceful woman squeezed my stomach until I growled and stuck a thermometer up my bottom. She then had a brief conversation with the humans, and before I knew what was going on another human came and snatched me up, put me in a cage, shaved a bit off my front leg and stuck a needle in me. The whole process was extremely distressing but I was so tired I fell asleep.

When I woke up the disgraceful woman was on the telephone, I think to my humans, telling them that I'd had an infection in my pancreas but that it wasn't serious, that I was looking a lot better, and that I could go home the next day. She was right about being better; I cleaned myself up a bit, had some food and drink and had a bit of a sniff of one of the humans, who said I was being smoochy.

The next morning, the male human came to collect me and took me home as if nothing had happened. All in all, a bizarre experience: I now have a very asymmetric haircut and I've heard the humans going on about the money they spent putting me in hospital. That makes me feel content: the best proof of love is food, but dollars come a close second.

Home sweet home

Kate and I have just eaten dinner sitting out on this bit of decking in the light of a mild Sydney autumn evening. Nothing special about the meal, but the feeling of being in our own place is blissful after so long living out of suitcases (even in North Bondi, we didn't have most of our belongings with us).

A few weeks ago we went to see the film Up In the Air. George Clooney's protagonist is pathologically obsessed with cutting off anything that could tie him down, and to this end he has a job which involves flying round the country with minimal baggage to sack workers whose bosses are too cowardly to let them go in person. He sidelines as a motivational speaker, where his catchphrase is "What's in your backpack?" As in, all the emotional and material things you carry around with you, metaphorically or otherwise, are holding you back. Needless to say, the film is in part about him rejecting his own philosophy.

Anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying that it's great now to have all our own STUFF again. Much as I can appreciate the principle of stripping life down to its bare essentials - I travelled round China for two months with nothing more than a shoulder bag, after all - I'm very happy now that I can go to my bookshelf and find that Upton Sinclair book I was thinking of. Ditto, that we can make banana smoothies in the morning when Kate is craving banananess. Ditto, having a printer/scanner rather than spending ages and $$$ in internet cafes every time I have to send off some form.

That's all the practical stuff. But the best thing of all is that feeling you get, when living in your own house, from making a cup of tea in the late night quiet; switching off all the lights; and climbing into bed with someone you love.

Farewell to Bondi

We've been living in our new gaff for a couple of weeks now and we're loving it. Best of all is having our own back garden and no psychotic and aggressive neighbours. In fact the neighbours in Petersham are great - it's one of the first streets I've lived on in a while where I genuinely felt part of a community, rather than a mass of transients.

But I'll certainly miss plenty about living near the beach - first of all, the name of this blog doesn't sound quite so appropriate any more. There is definitely a totally different quality about life on the edge of a continent - with the smell of the sea on the air when the wind is in the right direction - to life in one of Sydney's endless suburbs. When we first moved to Oz, my friend Paul got me to do a quick segment on BBC radio about the attractions of living in Sydney, and one of the main points that came to mind was the humbling, taking-you-outside-yourself quality of living so close to something so elemental and so powerful.

I felt a little bit of that when I first started working next to the Thames in London: watching the river's moods, the contained but brutal force of its currents swirling round the piers of its bridges. Stop for a moment to think about it, and there is something frankly terrifying about the way the strip of mud on which beachcombers sway their metal detectors in the morning has disappeared below 20ft of swirling khaki water by sunset.

But if the Thames gives you a sense of nature's awesome power, it's nothing next to the sea (and not just any sea: a sea you can run down to and swim in, dive into, or even surf on). The first time I swam there after arriving here, with Kate, Dorani, Dorani's friend Diamando and her daughter, we all went body-surfing on a sunny afternoon in early summer. It wasn't awesome body-surfing, but it was enough that if you caught a wave just right it would take you all the 20 metres in to the shore. And with your legs hanging buoyant in the water, you could pick up the force of the sea swirling around you, as if you were a human seismograph. Somewhere further out there, or on the same beach on a rougher day, that same sea could be moving with enough strength to kill someone.

Anyway, I think that's what I will miss most and most want to return to, if we can ever afford it. Kate much prefers the people around here - fewer trustafarians with Tango Tans, a less self-centred culture generally, less chance of ending your life stuck in the grille of a Toyota Landcruiser - and I'd agree with all that. But there is something quite unique about living near the sea, and I'd love to do it again. When a big storm comes in, you can watch it darken the surface of the water as it rushes towards you; in autumn, whales often play close enough to shore that you feel you could almost touch them.

The family just got bigger

Well we can finally reveal something that we've been keeping close to our chests for the past few months: Kate is 15 weeks pregnant.

If you've been wondering why this blog so far had much more in the way of musings on life/universe/everything than actual details of our life what you might all want to read, it's because most such details over the past few months have involved coping with morning sickness, getting up early for visits to the prenatal clinic, and other such things that we didn't want to post publicly until we were pretty confident that the pregnancy was going well.

Anyway, our last visit to the ultrasound clinic was great, as you can see from the scans: yes, there's fingers, legs, a brain, and luckily it looks so far that the bub has got Kate's nose rather than mine.



Kate has spent much of the day sorting her clothes into things-she-can-wear-now, hand-me-downs-that-will-prove-useful-in-a-couple-of-months, and not-for-a-good-while-after-the-birth. On the plus side, the morning sickness, which at one point was so bad that she couldn't even drink tea, has now receded enough that we had garlic in our gnocchi tonight.

Recipe time: apricot and vanilla compote

This one is in honour of Janine, who took us in when we were driven out of our house and even put up with the temporary residence of our cat, who loves compote on her muesli and who asked for the recipe. It's actually a rip-off of a Claudia Roden recipe and I think the provenance is Turkish - the Turks are absolute experts at puddings so that would make sense.

Before I first made this, I used to find fresh apricots a bit of a waste of effort. Eddie Izzard used to do a routine about how pears are underripe for days and days and days, taunting you with their hardness, then ripe for about 12 hours before becoming immediately overripe and horrible. I find apricots similar, but if anything even more capricious, with an edibility window that seems to be about five minutes. Cooking them is the way around this.

1. Get a bunch of apricots, halve them, and cut out the stone and any stoney stalkey bits. Layer them on the bottom of a frying pan, cut side up.

2. Get some caster sugar and sprinkle it on top. I used about one dessertspoon-full for every three apricots - it doesn't need a lot of sugar because there's so much in the apricots.

3. Get the seeds out of a vanilla pod by slicing it lengthwise and dot as much as you can on the apricots.

4. Put some water on them. They don't need much as, again, there's lots in the apricots. Enough to get halfway up the apricots is more than enough.

5. Put it on to boil on a low simmer. Once the water is boiling a bit, gently turn the apricots to get the sugar and vanilla mixed with the water. Keep it simmering until the apricots get to that nice compotey texture - their firm shape completely lost, but still holding together as discrete half-apricots.

6. Lift the apricots out and into a bowl with a slotted spoon or some such, keeping the syrup in the pan; you'll probably need to drain a bit more syrup back after doing this, as they'll exude syrup once they're out of the pan.

7. Turn the heat right up and let the syrup boil and foam fiercely, not letting it fully caramelise but keeping it on the boil until it's got a nice jammy texture, and the spoon leaves a few seconds' track when you drag it across the bottom.

8. Add this reduced mixture to the strained apricots, stir it together and chillax.

9. A good side for this is ricotta cheese, beaten up with icing sugar and ground cinnamon until it's just slightly sweet. Not too sweet, as the compote is sweet enough.

Stormy day in Bondi

Yesterday I went to my last swimming class (it went well; I can now swim 500m non-stop without getting out of breath, and I can breathe while doing freestyle without coughing up a litre of brine, a length of kelp and a discarded six-pack holder). The class was a replacement for a cancelled class two weeks ago, when Bondi Icebergs had been closed because of THIS.

Maybe that photo looks no more than normally rough and stormy. But a couple of things to add context: the spray in the middle of the picture is blowing just short of 100ft into the air; it's blowing up at pretty much the point where I was standing when I took these photos; and the water was flowing to and from the beach at such speed that the few people who tried to paddle were being swept off their feet and along the beach like dead cows in a flood.

There were a handful of surfers out there, but they were just bobbing around trying not to get swept onto the rocks; no one was able to stand upright, although a friend who was at Bronte beach on the same day told me that its much cleaner waves were attracting lots of eastern suburbs surfies who were successfully standing and riding them.

Bondi does get some amazing storms from time to time. In John Birmingham's "biography" of Sydney, Leviathan, there's a description of an even scarier sea on a similarly blazing beautiful day; he also points out that Flat Rock itself, the resilient 235-tonne boulder sticking out of the surf in the above photo, was actually blown up onto the rock shelf in a particularly brutal storm in the early years of the 20th century.

Still not impressed? Well, the waves didn't just break against Flat Rock:

Our refugee story, part two

So we left you with us in the house, trying to digest the aftermath of a verbal assault by our neighbour's brother.

The first question was whether to wait for our real estate agents to get back to us before going to the police. The next question was where we were going to spend the night.

The second bit was relatively easy: we stayed at Althea's on the night and installed Jasper there, and then moved in with our friend Janine who had just had her own difficult time getting rid of a flatmate/tenant who wasn't paying her rent.

The first bit was more difficult. If we told the police, we'd immediately be escalating the situation with this guy who had given us to understand that we ought to be scared of him. In addition, there was a question mark about what the police would actually be able to do; an Apprehended Violence Order, similar to an Asbo, could be used, but that was assuming that we were actually able to get it from the courts. However, the confrontation meant that neither Kate nor I was particularly keen to remain in the house, especially as Kate would be working from home; she certainly wasn't going to feel comfortable being at home with the french windows open, or indeed going out into the garden if this guy was likely to be around. That meant that we were going to want to move out, and we would do well to lodge our complaint with the police as soon as possible.



So we went to Bondi police station and were dealt with by a genuinely helpful and professional police officer; she explained that we would need the guy's name to get an AVO, and that they would send round a police car to the house so that we could get our stuff and to try to get a name out of our neighbour. About halfway through the process of giving a statement, we had second thoughts about whether we wanted the police to go round there tonight, or whether we would wait till we could speak to the real estate agents the next morning before letting our neighbours on that we were onto them. But at that stage it was too late: the car was round there already.

When we got there after giving our statement we discovered that our misgivings about immediate police contact had been correct. The officer who had stopped round at our house had spent the past 20 minutes flirting with our neighbour and was now keen to get back to the station for his dinner; he'd already made up his mind that the situation was our fault and our neighbour was blameless. I spoke to him and our neighbour while Kate got some things together in the flat.

"Did you manage to get his name?" I asked the police officer.

"I hardly know him," our neighbour interjected.

"She said he was called Peter," he said, looking away from me.

"Don't you have a surname?"

"She doesn't know," he said.

"I've only met him a couple of times."

"What do you mean? He's your brother."

"No he isn't."

"Well your son described him as 'uncle' and he described you as his family."

"He described him as 'uncle' because that's how he describes older men. It's a mark of respect." (This could have been believable if they were indigenous, but the whole family were very white, very English)

At this point the police officer interjected to back her up. "You see?" he said.

I was feeling I wasn't likely to get anywhere with this cop.

"Why do you have a problem with her?" he asked.

"Because his brother was letting their Staffordshire bull terriers run around the garden and come into our house."

"Oh but those dogs wouldn't do any harm," she said. "One of them's about ten years old."

"So you don't know the guy's surname but you know how old his dog is?" I protested to the police officer.

He looked away again. "Why are you making such an issue of this?" he said.

"Because her brother threatened to set dogs on us."

The cop started looking away. "I've got to go now," he said.

"Well can you stay here until we've got our stuff?"

"I'm not here as your personal security guard," he answered sourly.

So that was that. We got the cat, headed to Althea's, and haven't slept there since. I've gone back a few times to collect things and the post. As we couldn't get a name for the guy, we couldn't file a proper AVO; we've subsequently got advice from friends that it's for the best that we didn't, as the whole situation can deteriorate and end up even worse when you do manage to get one. We've been in temporary refugee camp with our wonderful friend Janine for the past fortnight, and Jasper has been in a separate holding camp chez Althea. And after an agony of househunting, we're going to move into a new place on Tuesday. Yay!

Where guitars come from

I came across this while walking along one of the backstreets in Bondi. I don't think anything I say could really add to the strangeness and pleasure of the image.



God knows who put them there, but I'm glad they did.

Why the Sydney property market is like the French job market

The worst thing about the past few weeks of temporary homelessness has been the experience of being thrown back into the cold supercilious embrace of the Sydney rental market. Londoners like to think their city is in the grip of a unique property madness, only barely alleviated by the recession, but this survey last week indicated that Sydney is far worse - second worst in the world, in fact, after cuddly old Vancouver.

This feels intuitively right. At one property I was looking at in Bondi Junction a couple of weeks ago, the real estate agent was a veteran of one of the glitzier London estate agents' Sloane Square office. She moved here about six months ago, and said that the property market in Sydney 2010 is crazier than it was in Chelsea in 2008 - and I'd already said I wouldn't put in an application, so she wasn't saying this to get me all desperate.

You come up against the sharp end of this any time you go to look at property, whether to rent or to buy. The first thing you notice is that you can only view a place at a few, very limited showing times, when there will be (often literally) dozens of other interested parties tramping through the house. At one viewing of a fairly average property directly underneath the airport flightpath in Stanmore last week, there were more than 20 people milling testily about on the pavement before we were led in for the standard 15-minute viewing slot. A house-hunting friend told us that in Paddington she turned up at a property with a one-in, one-out policy, as if it was some sort of achingly trendy nightclub rather than a small and slightly shabby flat.

This situation is made worse by the fact that almost all viewings are on Saturdays between around 10am and 1pm. That makes hunting for a rental property require the sort of planning skills necessary to pull off, say, a major sporting event or a terrorist attack. First you select your potential properties, weeding out ones that are obviously rubbish and desperately trying to track down elusive letting agents for more details on the borderline cases (if you do get in touch with them - and it's harder than getting an audience withe the Pope - the agent invariably hasn't got a clue).

Then you get out Google Maps, plot their locations and work out which properties you can possibly make it between in the limited time available, bearing in mind that between 10.30 and 12.30 there will inevitably be one 'possible' viewing almost every 15 minutes, however much you've whittled down your list. Finally, you draw up a battle plan, get a car for the day and scream around all morning trying to hit your rolling 15-minute deadlines. The only thing making this process easier is that, occasionally, the letting agents don't even feel the need to turn up, so you can move on early to the next place having waited five minutes, called their mobile phone, and found it turned off.

I've not dipped my toe in the sales market yet, but this is, if anything, worse. In most of inner Sydney, auctions are the norm, with very high reserve prices, so that there is a relentless upward pressure on prices accentuated by the excitement of the auction process. Australian banks, for all their vaunted austerity, seem to be pretty lax with their lending practices, so there's a lot of unaffordable debt chasing each property.

I've been puzzling over just why this is so insane. One obvious point is supply and demand: there's clearly far, far more demand for properties in Sydney, especially in the inner-Sydney suburbs where people like me want to live, than there is supply to meet it.

Part of that is probably a result of Sydney's status as an international city with a pretty shoddy public transport system - people who have lived in Europe, Canada, and places like New York expect to live in suburbs where there is a bit of life within 20 minutes' walking distance, a corner shop and a cafe, maybe a school, and hopefully a decent bus route or train station that will allow you to commute to the city centre within an hour. Most of Sydney just isn't like that - this is a gross exaggeration, but such suburbs are pretty much only to be found between the harbour and the blue line on this map:

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=City+West+Link+Rd&daddr=-33.88937,151.147156+to:Canterbury+Rd+to:Thornley+St+to:Gannon+St+to:Princes+Hwy+to:Raglan+St+to:Raglan+St+to:Crescent+St+to:Anzac+Pde+to:Crana+Ave&geocode=FTkl-_0dP14CCQ%3B%3BFcqh-v0dlgQCCQ%3BFeZs-v0dHFECCQ%3BFSxZ-v0dNIQCCQ%3BFfps-v0dYqYCCQ%3BFQ7H-v0d8CEDCQ%3BFRTG-v0dgDcDCQ%3BFcrE-v0d1lQDCQ%3BFRpc-v0dLo4DCQ%3BFR4_-v0dxgkECQ&view=map&gl=au&hl=en&mra=dme&mrcr=0&mrsp=1&sz=13&via=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9&sll=-33.880535,151.203117&sspn=0.116006,0.174923&ie=UTF8&ll=-33.880535,151.203117&spn=0.116006,0.174923&output=embed&w=425&h=350]

Zoom out and you'll see what a small proportion of the metropolitan area that makes up. So you have a large population of relatively well-off cosmopolitan locals, migrants and remigrants all competing for property that answers lifestyle expectations that are far from the Australian norm.

That explains the demand side of it, but not the supply side. We've been looking for places across an area with about the same population as five London boroughs, and the simple fact is that there's been very few places on offer. This, I think, is why the Sydney property market is like the French job market.

When I first came to this city nearly eight years ago, I was very impressed with the levels of tenants' rights available. It was harder to be evicted, there were more controls over handling of your deposit, and in contrast to the typical London tenancy agreement - in which there are pages and pages of tenants' responsibilities, and two lines of landlords' - both parties' duties and rights seemed pretty evenly matched. In other words, it is a great place to be an incumbent. Once you're leasing a property, you have escaped the rental market rat race, you've got good rights, and your landlord is likely to find it possible but unduly complicated to move you on without good reason. As a result, people just don't move so much once they're renting a place.

Likewise with the French job market - once you've got a job, you are almost impossible to sack and the benefits come flowing in. As a result, French people don't leave their jobs often, and Sydneysiders don't leave their homes. The flip side of this is that househunting in Sydney is like being jobless in France - frustrating, fruitless and humiliating all at once.

Oh well. We've got a place now, so I'm part of the boss class and don't need to moan any more.

Visit to Canberra

Just in case the last post makes you think it's all been doom and gloom with us over the past few weeks, we also paid a visit to the wonderful Canberra the weekend before our neighbour trauma.

Canberra gets a bad rap among Australians, who see it as a boring  mix of roundabouts and Little Boxes-style dormitory suburbs. But those who live there are, if not fiercely loyal (Canberrans are rarely fierce by nature), then at least appreciative of its benefits: big city-style services and attractions in a small town-sized place, a relaxed pace of life, lots of nature and personal space all around, plenty of well-informed, intelligent people.

We visited a schoolfriend of Kate's who she'd last met around 15 years ago; on a blazing Canberra summer afternoon, we all headed down to the sculpture garden at the National Gallery of Australia. It was a wonderful, peaceful time - especially compared to what happened the next day when we got back to Sydney.

Our refugee story, part one

It's been a while since I've posted because we've had a pretty terrible couple of weeks. The upshot of it is, we moved out of our place in North Bondi after being threatened by the brother of our upstairs neighbour, and we're going to be moving next week to a new place in Petersham, just north of my old stamping ground in Enmore.



All this started two Mondays ago, when I got word that there were some bookshelves in stock in Ikea way out in Concord, western Sydney, and hired a Ute to pick them up. As always with Ikea, however much you try to plan ahead something has to go wrong. In my case, although I'd stock-checked and location-plotted every item I was planning to pick up, I hadn't been counting on the fact that the cunning little brakes that stop the Ikea shopping trolleys rolling down angled travelators also kick into action when you load say five bookshelves onto the same trolley. So I spent a good bit of the afternoon trying to push an immovable trolley full of flatpacks around an underground carpark halfway up the Parramatta River, before finally loading it into a hired ute and driving it back to North Bondi, where the nearest parking space was 300m away.

Once I got back it became apparent that I wasn't the only one having a nightmare afternoon. Our neighbour diagonally above us had been testing our nerves for some time. She was a good example of the type that proliferates in Bondi in the summer and gives the suburb, and by extension Sydney, a bit of a bad name in Australia: orange spraytan, blonde hair extensions, surgically-attached stilettos, low-level alcoholism and a nose for a scrap. She found her seven- to eight-year old son a bit of a handful (fair enough), so sent him most days to play boisterously outside our flat instead (not so fair), where he would spend literally all day firing off a toy machine gun.

All that said, there was nothing in the situation at first to suggest we were going to have to move out. When we asked her to keep the machine-gun play to the far end of the garden she complied. We hadn't exactly made friends and privately she got on our nerves, but much of the time that's neighbours for you.



The problem came with her brother. He first came round just before Christmas, when I was out, and brought with him his pet Staffordshire bull terrier dog. I know that to their owners Staffies are lovely loyal creatures, but they're also responsible for one in six dog attacks in New South Wales. This one was being allowed to run around our garden unsupervised, which meant we didn't want to go out there and Jasper was left cowering indoors.  I think the conversation between him and Kate went something like this:

"You need to keep your dog under control."

"Calm down love, he's just having a run around."

"He's a fighting dog and he's running around unsupervised on shared property."

"Well we can hardly keep him in the flat all day, can we?"

"Fine, but if he comes into our shared garden he needs to be on a leash."

"What does it concern you anyway?"

"I don't want him attacking my cat."

"You need to calm down love, he's not going to attack anyone."

The guy was clearly a bit of a thug and equally clearly didn't intend to take instruction from anyone about what to do with his dog. But after that incident just before Christmas we didn't see him again until two weeks ago, while I was out at Ikea.

Kate first realised the dog was back when she heard our neighbour's son and a kid from the block next door calling out "miaow, miaow" into the house. They were standing on our balcony, at our french windows, with two Staffies, trying to entice Jasper to come outside. Jasper, sensible animal, was having none of it; Kate told them to get off the balcony (one of the kids protesting, "It's not my dog, it's my uncle's"); closed the french windows; and called our property manager to complain. He was off on holiday, but said he would look into it when he was back.

The next encounter was a few hours later, as I was unloading the Ikea flatpacks and trying to get them into the house. Kate was out the front of the block holding the security door open while I carried the flatpacks into the hallway of our flat; as I was moving the ute, the same guy came downstairs with his two Staffies, still unleashed, which promptly ran straight into our flat and started chasing Jasper again. Kate ran into the flat to flush them out; the man, helpfully, called out "That's gonna help" but otherwise pretty much ignored the situation as he sauntered casually out of the block.

When I got back in Kate had already gone upstairs to have words with our neighbour.

"Your friends' dogs have been into our house twice today. You've got to keep them under control."

Our neighbour clearly had her dander up and her her stilettoes were dug in. "You talked to my son today. Don't you ever talk to my son," she spat back.

"I told him to get off our balcony because he was taunting our cat with your brother's dogs."

"I don't care what the reason is, you don't ever talk to my son."

"But listen, you have got to keep your dog under control on shared property. It's in your contract."

"Oh yeah? Well we never had any problems here until you two moved in. If you want to make a problem we'll talk to the other neighbours and force you to get rid of your cat."

"You can't do that. We're allowed to have him here, he's on our lease. But those dogs aren't and you have to control them."

"Look I can't talk about this now, I need to bathe my son."

"OK fine, but let's make sure we talk about it later."

"Don't you ever speak to my son again," she said, and slammed the door.

So far so annoying, but nothing we'd move out over. I'm still moving furniture in and out of the flat; as I'm doing it, her brother comes past in a temper, calling out: "I'd help you if you weren't such a pair of pricks". He's hammering on his sister's door and eventually goes off round the back to knock on her french windows. We've barely got everything into the flat  when there comes an angry hammering on our own front door; I go to answer it.

This is the first time I've got a good look at him. He's probably a bit over six foot, with wolf-blue eyes and a nasty scar down one side of his nose. He's got short-cropped blonde hair and that ready-to-swing-a-punch stance you see on some blokes out on a Saturday night. Like our neighbour, he's British, with a bit of Essex or London in his accent. He is popping with anger.

"Don't you ever speak to my family again," he says as soon as the door's open.

"Hold on -"

"No, you let me finish," he says, jabbing a finger towards my chest. "If you ever speak to my family again, you'll be dealing with me."

He points to some sort of insignia on his beige collarless sweatshirt. It's a sort of black patch on the right shoulder - I have no idea what it was. "Do you know who you're dealing with here?" he adds. "If I ever hear from you again, you'll have a lot more than a few dogs coming round to your house."

It's our turn to close the door. We call our property manager and his colleague, and tell them that we'll be going to the police in half an hour. Then we sit and wait.

(to be continued...)

Change of door policy

We've had an eventful few weeks, hence the lack of postage of late. Anyway, the blog is back for the moment but some posts in future will be password-protected so that we're not washing too much of our dirty linen in public. Most of you should probably have already received the password from me - if you haven't drop me a line or comment on this post and I'll whip it out to you.

More on swimming

Is it just me, or is every discipline these days taught by aspiring Mr Miyagis?

You don't seem to be able to learn to cook risotto or use a spreadsheet without being reminded to keep your limbs loose and relaxed, concentrate on your body core, breathe to the bottom of your lungs, relax don't force it etc.

This is all actually a good thing because what I've learned in my first two swim classes is that the people you notice in the pool making a great song and dance about their powerful strokes are not very good swimmers. The best ones are moving their limbs pretty slowly - there's a reason it's called crawl - and hardly making a ripple in the water.

Unlearning some of the things I picked up in my imitative version of freestyle is the most difficult bit. Most of all, I've struggled to come to terms with the initially counterintuitive nature of good breathing. Like most people, I'm not keen on the idea of drowning, and taking big gulps of air when my mouth is half in the water doesn't come naturally to me; so like most (non-Australian) people, I tend to lift my head ooh about a foot out of the water when I take a breath. Which is of course a waste of energy, because you're going up and down rather than forwards. Another thing I had been doing (wrongly) was rationing my breaths out and concentrating on gulping my breaths in, when doing the opposite means you barely have to concentrate on inhaling when you come up for air. In addition, to keep my head up I've always tended to let my bum sink, which is why I tend to kick with my knees rather than my whole legs.

Unlearning all this is a pretty slow process, and each day I head down to the pool and splash around with my hair in my eyes, failing to catch my breath and feeling like a bit of a plonker. I have drunk so much sea water over the past few weeks' practice that I'm almost ready to switch to the Bear Grylls method of hydration. But I can feel myself improving, and each day there are a few lengths where I feel like I'm moving properly and I don't even end up out of breath. Whether I'll make it as an ocean swimmer by the end of the year is another matter.

Sydney goes festival...

Last night was the Sydney Festival opening night. I'd heard this mentioned a few times by different people over the past few weeks and thought, whoopee, a few plays and concerts have their first outings. Big deal.

What I hadn't realised is that the festival opening night is, like, a thing. For the duration of the night, a huge swathe of central Sydney, including treelined Hyde Park and the parklands of the Domain, were closed off to traffic for an immense free festival, with a good proportion of the acts that will take part in the ongoing festival turning out to perform for the night.

Of course there's no such thing as a free lunch, and ANZ bank (who have just completed one of those rather limp rebranding exercises which no doubt has the brand experts privately raging about their clients' lack of vision and the clients wondering why they embarked on the project in the first place) were sponsoring the whole shebang with free filtered water bottles and odd little electric hand fans which projected eerie They Live!-style messages when you switched them on. And proving the effect of good marketing on raising brand awareness, here I am telling you all about ANZ and their selfless dedication to free festivals.



There's a great atmosphere to a city when the streets have been closed off. At Martin Place, people were dancing among the road markings on Philip Street; at Chifley square, slightly dizzy lines of people milled around the tarmac waiting to have their water bottles refilled. Add to that the warm night air, the fruitbats circling the clouds of insects swarming the illuminated pinnacles of the buildings, the stars coming out - beautiful.

Icebergs ahoy!

I can remember as a kid watching that scary midwinter Russian ritual where people cut a hole in the ice and go for a quick swim in the frigid water. In fact I'm sure I've got a nasty image of Boris Yeltsin lowering his fleshy body into an ice hole, but I can't find video on YouTube so, following the first law of the internet, it must never have happened.

Anyway, with thoughts of that and the courageous Serpentine Christmas Day Swim in my mind, I found it hard to stifle a guffaw when I found out that Bondi's ocean baths are called the 'Icebergs'. Sure, in midwinter it must get pretty nippy but never subzero. These Aussies don't know they're born.

But what Australians lack in cold resistance they more than make up for in athleticism. As a Brit, going for a swim in Australia is simply embarrassing. The gym I used to visit in London boasted shamelessly about a 20m pool that would barely cut it in an Australian backyard. My local pool when I was last living in Sydney was a 33m one. It was considered so inadequate that it's currently being rebuilt as a proper 50m Olympic-sized model.

The length of pools seems to be in direct proportion to the ability of swimmers. Whereas in Britain I normally belong in one of the faster lanes, in Australia if you can't do a tumble turn you're pretty much consigned to the osteoporosis classes.

A big bit of that comes down to teaching: aged six, I remember being packed off to the William Penn leisure centre in Oxhey, where a tattoed bloke called Steve piloted a gaggle of kids around a urine-tainted pool until they could do a passable imitation of front crawl, back crawl and breast stroke. Once we could stay afloat and move forward, we were pretty much done. There was the sense that you were being taught swimming so that you would die of hypothermia rather than drowning if your ocean liner happened to hit an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland.

In Australia the objective is rather more ambitious. Swimming is a fully-fledged sport, and every kid is a potential Thorpedo. Kate says she learned to swim 'quite late' - ie, at the age of four. Some of these Aussie kids must be doing butterfly before they can crawl.

This has meant that until now I've never really been able to swim front crawl (which they call freestyle around here), and I'm going to have to do that if I'm to achieve number 4 of my New Year's resolutions - an ocean swim by the end of the year. So Kate's Christmas present to me was a course of swim classes down at Bondi Icebergs.

This post is getting a bit tl; dr so I'll leave my experiences at the pool for tomorrow's thrilling instalment.

A trip to Flat Rock

Well this blog is named after the feeling you get after a swim in the sea, and late in the afternoon yesterday the overcast weather that has hung around Sydney since Christmas finally started to clear up and the temperature rose. So I threw a snorkel and mask and a towel into a backpack and headed down to the beach with Kate and Althea.

I've always been more of a snorkelling than stroke-swimming or body-surfing fan. Snorkelling is like a miniature, up-close underwater safari. There's something too about floating weightless, diving down and feeling the pressure on your lungs and sinuses, feeling yourself jogged by the ebb and flow of the current and watching it sway the seafloor around you.

The best place to go snorkelling in Sydney is Clovelly, a sort of giant rockpool formed when a fall of cliff rubble all but blocked off the entrance to an inlet about the size of two Olympic-sized swimming pools. But Flat Rock, the spot where the cliffs of the South Head peninsula crumble down to the sand of Bondi Beach, runs it a pretty close second.

[caption id="attachment_114" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="You can't get much closer to the beach than this"][/caption]

Even getting in is a ride. The tide swells here over a platform covered in weedy green and red algae, and aficionadoes can time their entries and exits perfectly so that the gentle waves carry them into and out of the deep water. When the water is too rough it's less fun - one friend once got dragged over the rocks and got cuts all over his feet which stopped him walking for a couple of days. Yesterday, though, was beautifully calm.

Once you drop off the edge of the rocks you find yourself hovering over a garden of waving, crinkly seaweed, in which more acute eyes than mine would be able to find leafy sea dragons. This falls away into a landscape of sand, punctuated by the odd rock, overgrown with weed and orbited by small fish. In the blue middle distance a school of silver trevally, each as long as my forearm, nosed their way out of the shallows off to the deeper water. Garfish twinkled past, jerking their needle-snouts from side to side. Closer to the waves, some of the boulders are coated with algae as pink as Miami stucco, and down between them you find the real action - crimson-banded wrasse popping in and out of shelter, dun herring cale inspecting their hunting grounds, and fortescue and rock cale squatting grumpily on the bottom.

I couldn't get pictures of any of this because my camera ain't waterproof, so here's some shots of the waves breaking at the base of the cliffs north of Flat Rock:

[caption id="attachment_111" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="A bit rough for swimming, this"][/caption]

Jasper's prison diary: Part 4

Thursday, November 19 - yes, really, I overheard one of the humans saying it

Wonderful news! The humans came to visit!



Of course, I tried not to let on that I was excited. I am still utterly confounded by their role in all this. Perhaps they are being punished too, but if so, how come they are allowed to visit me?

They were very friendly when they arrived and immediately started picking me up and cuddling me and stroking me. It was all a bit much, what with the heat and the fact that really I needed to punish them for what they had done to me, so I scratched the female a bit in the nostril and after that they left me alone for a bit.

They had a talk with Jessica, who is a human who seems to live here and brings me food and new litter and water each day. If I am very cute she also gives me a bit of a stroke. I have decided to curry favour with her rather than the old humans: she seems a more consistent presence. I wonder if I can impress her by biting the old humans.

In truth, I was quite excited to see them when they came to visit today but I can't understand how they could have let this happen to me. I had a careful sniff when they arrived for any traces of scent from Fluffles or Mrs Minxie, but there was nothing. Maybe they're in the dark about this as much as I am.

They left after a couple of hours. I hope they come back tomorrow. I heard them talking to Jessica about how hot it was in my cell - I wonder if they were sorting out an air conditioner?

Later - One other strange thing I noticed. I distinctly heard them say it was Thursday when they were here. But I'm sure I was picked up on Monday, and it was only one night - a slightly long night, I admit - before I arrived here. I can only reach one conclusion: someone, or some cat, has stolen Wednesday. Perhaps I was brought here in advance because the perpetrator fears my powers of deduction. Cui bono, I thought to myself, cui bono? If I ever get out of here I will search for lists of calendar makers. If each week is going to be six days long in future, someone with inside information could wind up making a fortune.

Smells

With the exception of Smell-O-Vision (OK, not excepting Smell-O-Vision), modern communications have never been very good at conveying odours. So writing about the smells of Sydney in a blog seems futile, but it is the most evocative sense and I'm trying to capture a feel of what it's like living here, so here goes.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Sydney would smell so much more intense if I had one of these"][/caption]

Smells were, oddly enough, one of the things that Kate missed most about Australia. Londoners will no doubt complain that their city smells of old fried chicken boxes and exhaust fumes, but for the most part it is a strikingly inodorous city - I can't remember many occasions when I was forcefully struck with a strong smell, least of all a strong pleasant smell. The scent of barbecuing meat will always remind me of summer afternoons and a few times in summer you'll walk past some flowers smelling potent in bloom, but for the most part the city smells of paper and metal, ie nothing.

I think it must be something about the cleansing effect of the sea air and the ranker quality of vegetation in a warmer climate, but Sydney seems full of smells to me - Brisbane, closer to the tropics, even more so. Walking back from Bondi Beach last night the salty, seaweedy smell of the ocean swept over us in slow waves, and in between there were fragments of other, unconnected odours: the sweet smokiness of fish grilling in someone's garden, an astringent dose of eucalyptus sap, a tang of basil in a school vegetable patch, the rich dressing-table scent of frangipani blossoms. At night, you first sense the presence of the ubiquitous American cockroach (who seem to be the main element of pavement-traffic after humans once the sun goes down) through their not unpleasant pheromonal smell; jasmines glow a dull white in the warm summer dark, surrounded by heavy clouds of perfume.

Any old iron...

In Britain if you chuck an old TV on the pavement out the front of your house you're likely to be arrested as a fly tipper. In Australia, you're making a valuable contribution to the community.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="This would never happen in Australia"][/caption]

Hard rubbish day is a hallowed part of the calendar in any Australian suburb. This is the day, usually once a month or once every few months, when the council sends a bunch of blokes round in big vans to pick up any hard-to-dispose-of rubbish that people have left out on the grass verge outside their front doors.

The days leading up to hard rubbish day feel almost like the preparations for a festival. It's like Christmas decorations season but with knackered Lay-Z-Boys and bust DVD players. Crucially, a decent proportion of the rubbish never makes its way into the council vans, because locals tend to treat this bounty as a sort of giant, free flea market. This piece from the Melbourne Age, based on hard rubbish day in the trendy inner-city suburb of Brunswick, gives you a flavour of the thing.

One thing that's striking about this sort of public recycling is how astonishingly efficient it is. When we were clearing out our UK house we had a bunch of things which we were unable to sell or take with us, so we put them as free items on Gumtree, an internet small-ads site. Everything we advertised had been picked up by the end of the day - old barbecues and bikes, a filing cabinet, a folding card table...

Hard rubbish day is clearly coming up around here, although I've not checked the calendar. In the past few days we've seen:

• One large television with the corner kicked in


• One art deco three-door wardrobe, doors removed, some scratching on one side


• One kitchen chopping-block trolley thing, with a castor missing


• One flatscreen computer monitor, left under a hedge close to Bondi Beach


• A mattress spring frame, with a few wisps of foam attached


• Two sofas, both without cushions


• Several 80s-style tube-and-wicker dining chairs, all smashed in different ways

Of course, it is possible that hard rubbish day is nowhere near and this is just the general informal recycling that goes on much of the time in Australian suburbs. The spirit of hard rubbish day certainly spreads year-round: I remember when we were last leaving Sydney, Kate left a couple of dozen Buffy review videos she'd received from work in a box outside the house with a sign saying they worked and were free. They were all gone within a couple of hours.

Jasper's prison diary: Part 3

Tuesday, November 17 - I think, though all the timing seems wrong

So, we have landed. I think Chairman Meow was misinformed - this is not the hellish limbo he described, although it is certainly hot as hell. My winter coat was just approaching its full glory a few days ago - if the weather doesn't turn soon I'm going to have to shed it altogether.

Still no sign of the humans. I have been taken to some sort of penitentiary on the outskirts of the city. The usual indignities were performed by a vet on arrival, but I am almost immune to such behaviour now, and now at last I have a place to sleep out of earshot of those damned Yorkies. I have a concrete cell with a plastic box full of bedding on a sort of mezzanine floor. There is what passes for a metal ladder joining this to the ground, but it must have been built for a chihuahua because I can barely turn around on it.

I have been spending most of my time sitting by the grille looking out on the lawn. By the gods, it is hot! I'm feeling too tired to do anything much, and the light hurts my eyes if I look up at the sky. I have noticed one good thing, though: they're feeding me only biscuits. As long as this sun doesn't addle my brain and make me confuse them with the litter tray, I could get used to this.

But where are the humans?

Addendum: the nonsense side of green resolutions...

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="320" caption="Thermal image of a kettle boiling"][/caption]

I got a bit of inspiration for my list from this piece on the Guardian site. But I'm pretty sceptical about the article in general, particularly the estimates about how much CO2 you will save through particular actions. It seems to me that the actions suggested are a mix of genuine and fairly verifiable carbon-saving measures and more amorphous bits of contemporary middle-class do-goodism that don't have any real effect on emissions, and may in fact increase them.

One quick example: they reckon you can save 200 kilos of carbon dioxide a year through "never buying ready meals or processed food". Now I'm sure that lots of people consider this a laudable ambition on a par with eating only organic and knitting your own yoghurt; and I really don't know enough about food production to say for certain that it's not true; but intuitively it seems completely backwards.

Take processed foods. Which is more energy-efficient, a glass of freshly-squeezed pineapple juice, or a glass of the processed stuff? Assuming the fruit are all from the same source, the energy-efficiency basically comes down to packaging, processing, transport, and wastage.

• There's probably more packaging in the processed variety, because whereas both will probably be moved around in wooden pallets and cardboard crates, the processed juice will be in a can or bottle which can be recycled but will still cost some energy.


• As far as processing is concerned, the pre-processed juice is likely to be more energy efficient. For the pineapple-processor, energy is likely to be the second-biggest cost after labour, and so if they're smart they will be making efforts to reduce it. They will be processing on a mass scale, rather than using an inefficient home juicer that you switch on once a week. Commercial fruit-processing machines these days are no doubt marketed with rising energy and carbon prices in mind.


• For transport, the pre-processed juice is way out in front. My rough guess would be that a kilo of pineapples yields about 400g of juice. Add say 100g for a can or bottle and you're still carting only half as much mass around for the same quantity of juice in your breakfast glass. Kate grew up in pineapple country in Queensland and they process that stuff right next to the farms. So essentially, juicing a kilo of unprocessed Sunshine Coast pineapple in Sydney involves transporting 500g of waste material for 1,000km before sending it to landfill or for composting in another farming area outside the city.


• Wastage is the other factor. Canned pineapple juice lasts for at least a year without additives or preservatives, and more or less every pineapple grown on the farm goes into some part of the production line. Whereas the fresh variety will involve wastage at the wholesale, retail, and domestic stages, when someone over-orders, old pineapples go off, a crate gets knocked on the ground etc. There are probably cases where there's simply massive oversupply and whole acres of crop are just ploughed into fertiliser because they can't get a worthwhile price; but the existence of a flexible processing industry probably reduces the likelihood of this happening, by providing a safety-valve and letting farmers arbitrage between current low prices and future prices.

Anyway, this is getting a very long post but you get the idea. The same principles probably apply to ready meals to an even greater extent.

I love home-cooking but coming up with spurious arguments to make people feel morally superior about doing it bores me. Processed food may not always be as tasty as the home-made variety but it's often as good as any available alternative and I would be prepared to bet that, more often than not, it's more energy-efficient. The fact that we can afford to eat non-local, non-seasonal produce in an unprocessed form at all these days is a sign of how low energy costs are for most people in developed countries.