Sunday 29^th July

A beautiful East Coast day.  Cold but…glorious!

Headlam Family Weekend festivities all day long.  Pete and I have eaten SO much I think our scales will tip over and fail to register anything but Shock And Awe when we get back to Hobart…

In between eating, drinking, chatting and quizzing, we have been catching glimpses of the Olympics.  So sad!  Stephanie Rice sobbing bitterly – oh the grief, the embarrassment, of coming sixth… And the dominance of the Chinese!  I imagine that in a few years it will be nothing but Chinese winners in every category.  When we were watching the Opening Ceremony parade, I was looking at a few tweets on my iPhone.  One tweeter (twitterer?) wrote, when the Chinese contingent marched past, Have they brought the WHOLE country with them??

Our Opals, mind you, are looking pretty damn fine.  At the moment... they have not yet come up against The Chinese!!

After a brief adjournment between breakfast/brunch/lunch/afternoon tea Pete and I trotted off back to the main resort area to have a G & T.  We took Pete’s mum with us, in her big wheely chair-bed thingy.  There were a few children playing, very sedately, in the children’s play equipment pen, and one of the mothers (very friendly Julie) came up to apologise for “the noise.”  We laughed and said that we didn’t mind at all and that in fact very shortly our group would be increasing “the noise” exponentially.  And that in fact quite soon there would not just be an old lady in a wheely chair bed thingy with two sedate looking grown-ups.  There would be 42 humans, nearly half of whom would be - under ten. 

And indeed very soon in came Grace, Olivia, Matilda, Ella, Holly, Tessa, Sam, Evie, Olive, Oliver, Alexander, Sebastian, Solomon, Josh, Alice, Harry, Lizzie, Sophie – the under 10s – with all of the attendant parents and grandparents.  I could see Julie’s eyes widen as the ground trembled beneath their feet…and the playground suddenly turned into a primal pen full of fun, laughter and occasional…TEARS!