Reasons to be cheerful, #3

Put Another Prawn on the Barbie
& Hand Us Another Cold One, Sport!

    - when you've quite finished tying that kangaroo down!  Yes, Dear Readers, today is Australia Day.  So get out your swag bag, rustle up some tucker, put the tinnies in the cooler (or outside in the rabbit hutch in our case - we don't, currently, have a rabbit), grab yr hat with corks strung round the brim (you're supposed to take the corks out of the bottles first, sport!) & light up the barbie  (now there's a word with potential.  The doll is Barbie, right!)



    OK so Australians are, mostly, now well into Friday & Mozart's 250th Birthday celebrations, possibly nursing hangovers & cursing.  Cursing what?  They're Aussies, ok.  Over this side of the world it is around 5.30am on Thursday morning & I've gotten up a little early to blog.  Even though I have nothing in my diary for today - must have forgotten  to put it in.  So, having fed H his breakfast & seen him off to work, I shall go back to bed.  w00t! for days off.  Then it'll be house cleaning & I MUST get some sugar & make marmalade.  The oranges have been cooked since Tuesday evening.  They just need chopping, diluting, sugaring & boiling up.  Trouble is a lot of the jam jars are still full of blooming daffs!

    So why, apart from another Reason to Be Cheerful, are we (who aren't Aussies, not even naturalised ones) celebrating Australia Day?  Particularly when it's too cold out for a barbie?  Tell me, does that ever stop us in the summer? 

    Well, apart from another RTBC, cos what was once The Penal Dustbin has grown, matured (kinda) & become another great nation.  See, it is possible to outgrow yr 'childhood'.  Of course, if you're Abbo, sorry Indigenous* Australian, you may well have cause to regret that.  *Well you can hardly call them "Native Australian" when more than half of the population was born there now can you?  Even in a country which only celebrated it's 200th Anniversary a few years back, or the arrival of the first prison convoy anyhow (which sailed from Portsmouth, UK), there are (white) people who can trace their family history back five or more generations in Oz.  Though I gather that these days the 'Mother Country' is as likely to mean somewhere 'out East' as here, & why not?

    So before I write any more rubbish & get more indignant (& hungover) postings from readers from Down Under, I'll change the subject.   It's been cold the past few days, but clear & sunny.  w00t!  Give me a few degrees lower & the sunshine any day.  I cycle so I'm warm(ish unless the wind is too strong & Northerly or Easterly, which it ain't bin yet) & it is so nice to be able to see the sky rather than duvet thick clouds nailed to the chimney tops.

    Dare say there were other things to be written, but time is getting on & H should be down for his breakfast soon.  Yup, that's him off to the bathroom.  'Scuse me while I go rustle up something.

    But before I do . . .



    We had custard - Ambrosia Devon Custard, with our pudding last night.  H carefully checked the list of ingredients - no elephants listed anywhere.  Not even a 'Warning: may contain disguised Elephants!"  & I checked it carefully when I poured it out.  No elephants.  We decided that there were other substances they might use to colour the soles of their feet, & the ends of their trunks, yellow - daffodil pollen for starters!  Then I went to watch TV & saw the 'catch up' follow-up to 'Elephant Diaries'.  Only ellies in Tsavo look as if they're milk chocolate coated when wet & dark gingerish when dry.  Not a yellow foot among the whole herd!

    So put another steak on the barbie (there are veggie haggis, dunno about veggies in Oz.  Probably weren't PoHMs!), hand us a cold one, stand up & sing "Waltzing Matilda" & y'all have a nice Australia Day now!