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.