At Christmas 2002, I attained a long held ambition which was to spend the afternoon of Christmas Day on the beach. We were staying at Jervis Bay South of Sydney where we had borrowed a cottage with some friends and work colleagues from Canberra.
The cottage we had was wonderful, literally across the road from the beach, had a super pool in the back garden and a gas bbq on the terrace. No Australian house would be complete if it didn’t have a bbq of some kind and this one was of a size to cater for the 8 people sleeping over. It was an assorted bunch as well, 5 of us were Brits with 2 Canadians, one Zimbabwean and one Dutch. This meant that beach sports therefore varied from cricket for those of is from enlightened lands to American football to placate the colonials.
We’d had a secret Santa in the morning which had uncovered lots of throwing games for the seaside. We went down to the beach to make use of the gifts as well as swimming and playing in the sea with one of the chap’s boogie boards that he’d brought along, and then once we’d finished at the beach, we returned to the house for the Christmas meal, which we were doing on the gas bbq.
And then sod’s law, the inevitable happened, just as we were all set and I was pressed ganged to see to the bbq, it began to rain which led to a sudden rush to get everything from the meticulously arranged garden table and get it inside. It was just as well that we weren’t using a charcoal bbq since at the time the rain began we wouldn’t have had time to get the fire going properly and it would have been extinguished. As it was, the gas kept going and all was well although I got distinctly soaked as the rain got heavier. It kept on raining all through Boxing Day which didn’t worry the chaps too much because the weather in Melbourne was good and the 4th Ashes Test match wasn’t affected at all. At the end we wished it was as England were thrashed.
We quite often had a bbq for chums at our apartment block, as it had a huge beast in the grounds by the pool, which could be booked at reception for a reasonable fee to pay for the gas. It used to make for a pleasant evening to have people come over on a school night, they’d bring their swimming kit and we’d all spend a couple of hours lounging about and then have a cook up with plenty of cold beers. The quintessential Australian experience and it made the working week far more acceptable.
Earlier n the year, we had been to a small town in New South Wales called Boorwa where they were celebrating a wool festival. Among other activities, the town hotel had dug out a huge charcoal bbq and had three chefs madly grilling steaks, lamb, pork and chicken joints and cuts. I loved the whole day, but the funniest thing was a fashion show where they had changed the back of a truck into a catwalk. The fellas that they had modelling the men’s clothes seemed so out of place that it looked as if he’d been talked into it the night before in the pub, forgotten about it in the morning and been reminded shortly before it was time to get ready and the reaction had been “I said I’d do WHAT?” It was hilarious.
I loved Australia, it was great fun though winter nights in the national capital are so cold as to be not funny, especially when buildings don’t come with central heating as standard which was quite a shock. But the summers really made up for it.
