Chronicles of a Trailing Spouse...

Curiouser and curiouser'  says Alice when she finds herself in the weird and wacky Wonderland. It is a phrase which frequently springs to mind here Down Under, not least when observing the locals. You see dear reader, they   sort of look  like us, and apart from the need to cut every word in half because they simply can't muster the effort to intone the entire  thing (time which could be better spent lighting a barbie or opening a beer), they sort of sound like us too -- well at the very least we share a common language. BUT in so many other ways the Australians are just utterly, hopelessly foreign. For example; I was standing in a queue in IGA the other day -- bracing myself for the inevitable rip-off which was to come -- and in front of me was a tall man decked out in a high visability shirt and tiny, kylie-esque shorts. At the end of his spindly brown legs stood an enormous pair of steel-capped work boots, with ankle socks peeking char...

I've noticed something lately: there are rather a lot of old people here in Oz -- I mean LOADS of them, and sometimes I feel like I've wandered into an episode of the Twilight (years?) Zone , where the protagonist wakes up one morning to discover the entire population has aged overnight. I can't remember seeing this many pensioners in Ireland, and if there are, well they must all be hiding away at home, or in mass or something. Or perhaps they're all at work -- can't afford to retire. And every time I take a trip to my local mall, I'm surrounded by octogenarian males shuffling around in tiny shorts and socks up to their knees, like grotesquely overgrown school boys. Their wives stagger along behind them as if to say 'You must go on without me...we can't both make it back alive.....' As a result of this, there seems to be rather a lot of adverts on the telly selling insurance for funeral costs or 'to take care of your loved ones...', an...