Monday 19th December

Another busybusy Hobart day

Some furniture moving, bed making, hunting for this and that in the basement of Pete’s house.  (Where ARE those single doonas?  Those pristine white towels??  That food processor, ancient but functional??) 

At the end of the day I met up with a dear friend in Salamanca and drank half a bottle of sparkling wine.  While I was showing her a videoclip of children dancing on 2XS on Ramata island in the Solomons, I saw – James Butler, our Tasmanian Hydro friend who spent some time with us in Honiara.  He was the very one who recommended us to go to Ramata in the first place…small small world!

A lovely woman I spoke to at the lunch in Bothwell yesterday told me of her time working as a galley girl on one of larger big tall ships in the 80s.  On one of their trips to New Caledonia they had very violent stormy weather and were diverted to New Zealand.  One of the poor paying passengers, whose dream it had been to travel on a tall ship, was dreadfully ill.  She just wanted, as I can understand, to DIE.  They had to set two people on guard to watch her at all times otherwise she would have hurled herself into the surging sea!!  Oh hell!

(Where are we staying?  Well we are sharing ourselves – ahem – around our family, inflicting ourselves upon this set of offspring or that, willy-nilly… At the moment we are with James and Bronwen in Mt Stuart.  Tomorrow is another day!)