Chronicles of a Trailing Spouse...

We recently took a trip down south to Pemberton (four hour drive from Perth, five and a half if you set the sat nav incorrectly). To be honest, my motivation for this trip was largely based around the fact that Pemberton sounds a bit like Pemberley - that great rolling Derbyshire estate owned by Mr Darcy in   'Pride and Prejudice' --  and I had some half arsed notion that I might actually spot Colin Firth's 'Darcy' emerging from a lake, ruffle shirt clinging, dripping with lake-water, brooding and proud.  Oh lovable, proud, Darcy! To an extent I almost did get a bit of Jane Austen's England. Pemberton, and the surrounding area, is astonishingly green and were it not for the red sand which bordered the roads and tracks  (oh, and the tin houses - lots of tin houses!) , one could almost believe they were driving through Derbyshire, with verdant hills and lush forests.  We visited the beautiful Karri Valley resort , which nestles snugly on the edge of ...

School holidays nightmares... I hate school holidays. They feel like a personal attack on those of us who are reckless enough to have more than two or three kids. I don't quite know who is inflicting this attack -- I haven't thought it through that far -- but probably some kind of 'one-child policy' conspiracists ...or rather, 'two-to-three-child-policy' conspiracists, who disapprove of the four-or-more brigade). I say this because, when I had just a couple of kids I quite liked the school hols; for one I could snooze late by locking the bedroom door so the children couldn't escape (they all slept in my bed anyhow), putting on a Little Mermaid DVD, and throwing brioches, muffins and milk at them so that I could snatch an extra hour of semi-dreaming, albeit with a Disney soundtrack. We'd eventually get dressed and venture out to a play centre or park for a couple of hours, followed by baby-bowls from Bewley's (ah for the days when the kids w...