Life's a beach

The landscape down at the beach today resembled a scene from some sort of disaster movie - huge lumps of kelp roots flung all along the tide-line, almost obscuring the sand. You can always tell when there's been a big storm out at sea!

At first glance all you notice is large lumps of brown something with fronds of seaweed attached, but if you look carefully there are marvellous details... I know little about seaweed, so I'm extrapolating from the debris on the beach, but small plants anchor themselves to rocks with a web of roots, from which grows a stem - but these root balls can be HUGE - the size of a football, and they're quite impressive, strewn all over the beach! And then there are the sponges. Large clusters of dense, finger-like sponges grow together, anchored to a rock, and they get ripped off by the storm tides and thrown up on to the beach as well. Initially they look quite boring: a sort of dull, olive-algae gree, but here and there you see shiny patches of bright mauve and a pearly lilac, which are the smashed-open shells of barnacle colonies that attach themselves to the sponges. Other sponges arrive on the beach too: soft, pale yellow ones that look like brain corrugations, and today - the only time I've seen one - a beautiful, foot-long cylindrical sponge with a tiny cellular texture that was formed into deep honey-combs. It looked like some exotic fruit, perfectly shaped, and washed up. I'd have kept it, only I know that they begin to smell very quickly!

Occasionally you can see bright patches of red: sometimes it's algae on a rock, sometimes it's a small piece of brightly coloured seaweed, but mostly it is the small balls of sea urchins: fresh ones with their spines still attached, or sea-washed old ones which are hollow.

In some ways I find less washed up on the beach than I might have expected, when I came here. There's not much rubblish, thankfully, but also few shells. I suspect that the currents around here mean that most shells are smashed to smithereens by the time they arrive on the beach, for the 'gravel' is largely shell fragments... but today I also came upon a patch of what I thought was gravel but it turned out to be lots of tiny, complete shells. I've just excavated a handful from my pocket - I always have a pocket, down at the beach, just in case! - and I've come out with a lovely dark-green spiky fragment of crustacean shell, which is a beautiful clotted, creamy colour on the inside, with a bubbly texture. It's still got a fringe of bright orange hairs along one edge, suggesting it's part of an articulated flange from a tail joint, perhaps. Then there's a polished fragment of abalone, two striped cowrie shells, a small cream-and-red cone shell about the size of my thumb nail, and a twisty snail shell in smart black-and-white checks. Then two dark buey-green snail shells with a pearlescent finish, and a worn limpet whose shell has been eroded so that it's almost star-shaped.

I wished I'd had a camera there today to capture it all, particularly one piece of seaweed that I almost trod on. It had a collection of eggs attached to one side, and they were the most beautiful shape: they were slightly flattened cylinders, extending a good inch out from the weed, and packed tightly together so they were tessellated. A few stragglers were sprinked off along one edge, but the main group were tightly bunched. Each egg was a sort of rubbery white colour, with a tiny hole on the flat top of the egg. Sad, in a way, that they weren't going to hatch, but beautiful! I wonder what they were?

Whales, whales, and more whales

Yep, I've just come down from the back verandah to tell you about seeing at least two (possibly three) BIG blue whales cavorting off the coast, through our telescope. Magnificent! I'm only sorry that Michael's not here to have seen them too...

What appeared to the naked eye as a very small white wave-crest at a distance turned out to be, after considerable magnification, big whales breaching and playing off Split Solitary Island. You get a real sense of them having fun: they were slapping the water with their side flippers, and leaping out of the water, frontways, backwards and twisting as they leapt. It may sound a bit crazy, but I could almost feel the joy of air on their skin and the currents of water as they swam... I wonder if leaping out of the water for a whale is a bit like paddling in the sea for a human: a brief encounter with another world, one in which you are not equipped to survive, but which you find exciting and envigorating. This group really did seem to be playing: usually if they're feeding, especially near the surface like that, there are flocks of birds following the fish but there were just a couple of lazy gulls flapping around and it didn't look like feeding. Through the telescope I could even see the black bulk of them just under the water as they slowly swam around, blowing through their blow-holes. It was great watching them.

Eventually, though, I had to stop: there are disadvantages to clamping one eye to a telescope on a bright day: when you stop looking through it and try to use both eyes, you find that one pupil is more dilated than the other and - elderly as I am - it took a while to settle down so that I could focus normally again! I don't yet need bifocal glasses, but I am noticing (have done for a couple of years) how difficult it is for me to change focal distance... And I also realised that it's just gone TEN YEARS since I had those awful eye haemorrhages! Amazing - ten years ago I moved back to Bristol, leaving my soon-to-be-ex husband in a psychiatric institution in Chichester, and started work for Motionbase down at Ashton Gate. I'd only been in my new job for 4 days when my left eye haemorrhaged and I ended up spending a week in the Bristol Eye Hospital. I had four haemorrhages in all: three in my left eye and one in my right eye, and it's very noticeable to me when I look through the telescope: there's lots of residual 'muck' floating around in both vitreous humours, which make seeing a bit of an effort sometimes. After ten years I don't suppose any of it is going to dissipate now.

Good ideas

There are some things about Australia that are great, and here are two very small examples: a) you join a gym, paying out for a full year's membership even though you know that you'll be going on holiday. Simple! You can put your membership 'on hold' for up to 14 weeks a year (I wish I had 14 weeks holiday a year!), thus ensuring that you don't lose out; and b) you sign your child up for regular lessons - ballet, Tae Kwon Do, swimming - and for one reason or another you can't make one of the lessons. Easy! All of the institutions involved have regular 'make up' sessions timetabled in every week, so if your daughter couldn't make her regular Tae Kwon Do lesson at 4pm because she was at the airport waving goodbye to Daddy, no worries! She can go to the regular Friday 5pm 'make up' session.

So simple, and yet so effective... Although you've shelled out a lot of money on membership fees or termly lesson fees, you don't feel that you're going to lose out. It seems so sensible that I wonder why I've never seen it offered in the UK?

And another good idea: you can fill in a simple form at the Post Office and they will keep your mail while you're away - so you don't have to arrange for a friendly neighbour to clear out your post box, or have it all pile up as an advertisement that you're on holiday... Here, of course, you have a mail box at the bottom of your driveway rather than a letterbox in your front door. Not that it does us much good: our postie (who rides a motorbike with distinctive orange 'AustraliaPost' paniers) can't be bothered to get anything larger than an envelope out of his bag most of the time, particularly if it requires a signature. Instead, he'll wave at us as we look down at him from the house at the top of the (steep) driveway, as he drops a 'We tried to deliver your parcel today but you were out' card into our mailbox... That's one of the things that's not so good.

Whales and Parrots

Michael and I have seen our first whales from the verandah! We were out there at lunch time, having a bit of a scan of the sea with our telescope and Michael picked up some small whales wave-slapping and blowing; Minke whales, perhaps? Very exciting! We stayed out watching them for about half an hour, taking it in turns to look through the telescope...

A few minutes ago I just had a 'parrot encounter'! A beautiful King parrot (a smallish parrot with lovely green body feathers, a red and yellow collar and a bright blue head with a red beak) flew down to the verandah rail while I was admiring the view and had a whole chirruping conversation with me, not six inches in front of me, turning its head this way and that and clearly asking why we've taken down the parrot food block that we used to hang up. I explained, very politely, that we were fed up of being woken at dawn by flocks of King parrots squabbling about who could have the next peck at the bird food... It had a bit more of a conversation with me and flew off - absolutely unafraid.

Snail's Pace

We are moving along slowly with our house plans, although we have to go back to the drawing board as we can't build where we wanted to build on our block. This weekend there will be an alternative energy show at Bellingen (a slightly hippy dippy town about 25 miles away, south and inland a bit), and as our architect and his family were planning to go too we're hopefully going to visit the show and then go and have lunch with them somewhere local.

I suspect that we will have to build upwards on a much smaller building 'footprint', but we'll have to wait and see what Christian says when Michael takes him to look at the options on Wednesday morning.

Meanwhile we're eyeing up reclamation yards for likely recycled flooring etc. It turns out that my student's family run a large yard in Coffs Harbour and we want to take a look there. It could potentially save quite a lot of money, for example, if we bought good quality second-hand kitchen units for the guest area and put on new handles and a new worktop... that's the sort of thing we're looking at, together with recycled floor boards. It's probably a bit early to start buying things (not least because we have absolutely nowhere to store anything else), but it doesn't hurt to look!

What we did do last week was to register our details with rental agencies in the hope of finding a better place to live. We don't hate where we're living - the ocean views are wonderful - but we're being over-charged given the lack of useable garden space and the fact that our landlady has some of her stuff in our garage. Plus, of course, we're paying extra for me to have a separate studio as there is nowhere for me to work at home. If we could find somewhere large enough for me to work too, then we'd be saving a lot of money each month. Our lease will be up at Christmas anyway, and we've decided to look early, instead of having a last minute rush at peak holiday season, in the hope that we'll be able to take our time and find somewhere nice. We might be living in it for two years before our own house might be finished!

Visitors

The faces might not be familiar to many of you, but Claire is the daughter of one of my mother's great friends, Sheila Powell, who was also my god mother, and Roger is her partner. Claire's eleven years younger than me and to be honest, I haven't had much to do with her or her brother Matthew over the years, but Claire's had a job in Bristol and we saw them briefly (with their parents) just before we left the UK. It was with some surprise that we discovered that they were coming through Coffs Harbour on a grand world tour and last week they came to stay with us for two delightful nights. We didn't do much apart from talk, eat and drink, but it was very pleasant!