Back 'Home'

So today we (Paul, Cherie, Annie, Michael and I) flew back to Perth. This involved a lot of child-amusement at the airport, and a very tearful farewell on the part of Christina. Before we left the Chettles, Nathan added Christina and me (though largely as an afterthought) on Facebook, and drove us to the airport - he still had P plates on his car as apparently they do the driving test in two stages here, and ahving P plates is mandatory for a certain number of years after you've passed the first element. 

When we got back to Perth (I was seated away from Paul, Cherie and the kids, which actually I was pretty thankful for, although they were impeccably well-behaved, when I got up to go to the loo, they were crawling all over a tired-looking Paul). On the taxi ride back to the house, Paul chatted away to the reluctant cabbie in a way that really weirdly reminded me of Mart and the way he used to do that 'chatting with the Joe Public' in that awful miscalculated and ostentatious way politicians do (provided Joe Public in question is not a bigot, that is) in an attempt to prove himself 'one of the people' (e.g. mentioning their name an awful lot, 'so Ahmed, do *you* have children?'...and then casually bringing it up later on, in case you didn't notice at the time 'when I was talking to that 40 year old black man earlier, he'd been a cabbie for 30 years serving this country...' etc etc). As we drew into the driveway, the nieghbour across the road who had been looking after Rosie the Jack Russel for the week appeared, rather randomly, with a large bag of grapefruit she'd picked from her garden for the family. The remainder of the day was spent re-adjusting to Perth time (they're an hour and a half behind) unpacking, and doing food shopping etc, but that was more than enough excitement (not to mention travelling) for me

Night night!

A xx