Eating with Morrisey

We've not been out to eat nearly enough, mostly because Croydon doesn't have many restaurants and a little bit because of darling Ethan's rather restricted diet - there are just so many times you can visit pizzerias, knowing that you could easily create nicer food at home.

So my parents being here was an opportunity to get out a couple of times. Our first venture was to a small place in Newtown. After wandering around yet another suburb, we eventually found our destination, "Oscillate Wildly", wonderfully named after the Smiths' song. It was a very cute foodie place, doing cut-price gourmet dishes that had restaurant critics singing its praises, erm, wildly. It focussed on delivering a well chosen piece of meat of fish, such as their own smoked trout, or a precisely cooked venison, and accompanying it with an exotic sauce or two - horseradish and beetroot for the trout, and chocolate soil and more beetroot for the venison, whilst Helen had a chicken liver parfait (pate for those in the less posh seats) with big crisps, and lamb with a peanut sauce. It was excellent and very cheap - the Sydney Morning Herald had a very impressive review .

We accompanied it with a pinot noir that we bought through auction, a Metier 1998. This was an excellent wine with full-bodied fruit and cherry and that lovely scent of boiled cabbage that distinguishes all the finest pinots. We've now drunk our way through the case we bought in February, so we're wondering what to try next. Recommendations of fine oz wines are always welcome.

Afterwards we did what all wise parents do on their first night out in four months - we crashed a private viewing at a gallery to get some more wine, then careered clumsily around a bar,leaving trails of blood and wine in our wake. Happily, the artists enjoyed our constrcutive criticisms, and the bar tender was able to find a plaster for the profusely bleeding cut on my shin, coming from a low-lying protuding
edge.

Jervis Bay - last shot at summer

The school term has been incredibly long and fairly intense for Georgia and Ethan, so we felt no guilt about skiving off school for a week to go to the beach. Also, the grandparents are here and we wanted to show them more of Oz than Sydney has to offer. First, we headed inland to Canberra for a 1 night whistle stop tour of our favorite places in the capital. Stayed in a great hotel (with spa, we are getting to like these v.much). We then drove east over the Great Dividing Range to the coast and up a bit to Jervis Bay. We had booked a beachside cabin (with spa) in Booderee National Park. We were miles from anywhere, or specifically 13km down a dirt track deep in the heart of the bush forest. We arrived in the evening so it wasn't until the next morning that we discovered the deserted, beautiful beach. The sand was so clean and white that it squeaked when you walked on it, completely undeveloped, remaining pretty much as it has looked for centuries. To reach the beach we followed the river next to the cabins, calm and wide enough for us to all learn to kayak on. We spent 4 days here, basically just enjoying the experience, walking, kayaking, snorkling, playing on the beach and watching the kangeroos that gathered outside our cabin every morning and evening. We found out we were part of a long history of people who have been coming to this place on holiday since the 1890s. Next time any of you come out this way, check this place out: Bay of Plenty Lodges

Pet Shop Boys and other treats

Ian's parents, Charlie and Shirley, arrived to visit for a month towards the end of March. Despite the length of journey, they coped well and have been enjoying themselves greatly doing the Sydney sights. For the first week, the children were at school, and Ian was working, so they, in the words of the Pet Shop Boys, were "left to their own devices".

Talking of the Pet Shop Boys, Neil and Chris were in town doing Sydney gigs. And since Ian and Helen now had baby-sitters on tap, they booked themselves into their first music festival since Glastonbury 1994, the Sydney V Festival.

So it was, on a sunny Saturday, that we (notice the subtle segue into the first person - Ian Mcewan, eat your heart out) found ourselves emerging from the gloom of the CityRail system into the bright daylight of Bondi Junction. The festival was at the Centennial Park rather than the beach, and after a short walk we found ourselves in what turned out to be the shortest queue of the day (only 40 people deep) to get into the festival. It was still mid-afternoon and we were old enough to be the parents of nearly everyone else there - it was only as darkness fell that the more aged patrons of popular music would show their faces.

After the trauma of having suffered a queue - the Internet and other technologies have nearly banished queues from our lives, a blessing which is not celebrated often enough - we thought we would assuage our pain through food and drink. And then we discovered that the organisers of the festival had hit upon a novel way to ensure crowd control: To ban anyone from bringing drinks in, and to only provide four beer taps for the tens of thousands of thirsty folk in the festival. We queued for twenty minutes, listening to the rather charming interpretations of 80s classics by Nouvelle Vague - the Dead Kennedy's would have been very impressed by the jazz version of "Too Drunk to F***" - till we finally found ourselves at the front of the queue to discover that they'd run out of lager. At 4pm when finish-time was 11pm. Piss-up, organise, festival, unable - rearrange these words into a sentence of your choosing. We grumpily took plastic cups of Cooper's Pale Ale, and contemplated where and who we would see.

By this time, we could hear Nouvelle Vague competing with New York Dolls at 110 dB (whilst we may have been twice the age of the rest of the audience, we were two thirds the age of most of the performers), providing an appropriately chaotic soundtrack. But most of the crowd seemed unphased by the imposition on their time. Having supped, we wandered over to hear Gnaarls Barkley (these two were probably the youngest performers), who were fun, but you needed to be well-versed in rap culture to catch the subtle nuances of their performance - "all the ladies in the house say yeah!". So after another ten minutes queueing to get into the gents toilets, we passed through the surprisingly unaromatic field to see Jarvis Cocker run through a set of his own material, and who after a few minutes had the crowd eating out of ironic hand. He was most excellent, and it was reassuring to hear thousands of voices singing along to "The c***s are still running the world".

Next were Groove Armada, playing what seemed to be a set of their greatest hits - even if we couldn't put titles on the songs, they all seemed familiar (Has Steve Macaulay told you he knows someone who knows...). With their block-rocking beats, and wonderful synth breakdowns, it soon appeared to be a very large club, with everyone dancing away. Even we let loose our dancing shoes, and were transported to our dancing days of fifteen years ago (where Groove Armada were playing on the Womad stage at Glastonbury).

Last were the PSB, and Helen decided we were going down the front. Even in my gig going days, I would rarely venture into the mosh-pit, so it was with trepidation we worked our way to the front of the stage, where we found ourselves with a number of other forty-somethings - perhaps this wasn't going to be a crowd-surfing gig then. Chris and Neil were excellent, Chris in yellow hoodie and cap standing stage-left behind his computer, whilst Neil, two absolutely gorgeous male dancers, and three singers worked their way through theatrical productions of their greatest hits, the crowd singing along throughout.

And so ended our first festival in fifteen years, and we made our sober way out, thinking that we should have brought the car, and queued unsuccessfully for buses and taxis till we finally walked back into the centre of town and home. A good day out, and we've resolved to take the children to WOMAD or some other child friendly thing next year. As long as we don't have to queue.