21st February

Thursday 21^st February

Recently it has been brought to my attention that there is a wonderful service called…Jewellery Rescue! (www.jewelleryrescue.com.au)  (It would be of no use to me at all; my missing items of jewellery have all gone overboard into the deep blue and unforgiving ocean and are beyond rescue, but for land-based jeweller-losers, this is a great thing.)

It is based in Sydney but has a network of eccentric and desperately keen people with metal detectors at the ready.  Our new DP, Nicole, lost her beautiful new topaz Phil Mason ring within hours of buying it a few Saturdays ago.  She had been wearing it while feeding her horses, flinging hay around in the paddocks.  It was only later that evening that she discovered her loss.  She phoned a friend, as you do, and was given a ray of hope.

The next morning, bright and early, an extremely cheerful woman from the Huon area arrived, armed with her metal detector.  She was thrilled to bits with the prospect of finding the needle in a haystack.  Nicole is very well-organised and efficient and she knew exactly where she had been flinging the hay, and after an hour or so, ping PING went the detector, and there was her ring, in a clump of long grass along the fenceline.  Shrieks of delight all round!

Sydney-Darwin 2008

Karen and Max dropped me off at the airport.  I was just a bit nervous about my e-ticket because I had been receiving many emails and texts from Jetstar, saying, Your flight from Brisbane leaves at 11.30am.  I asked Karen if she thought she could whiz me up to Brisbane to catch the plane if necessary and we laughed happily at the concept.  But I was just a bit anxious - my ticket definitely said the plane left from Sydney, but why the texts and emails re Brisbane??  I was at the airport very early, just in case… I checked in and didn’t say anything at all about the emails re Brisbane, also just in case… Whenever I am going overseas, I always have a lurking suspicion that I won’t get there, so I was very relieved to have a boarding pass firmly in my clutches.  Just ahead of me in the check-in queue was an extremely angry woman, who was obviously at the wrong airport, or late for check-in.  I watched wide-eyed as she was led away by security guards, shrieking, “What’s your name?  I am going to report you!” to the extremely courteous young bloke on the counter.  Hours to fill in Sydney airport… Cup of coffee.  Bookshops.  Last-minute purchases from pharmacy.  (Did you know you can get darling little pads soaked with nail polish remover?)  There is lots of food in Sydney airport.  I knew a man a few years ago who talked a lot, more than you could imagine, about Krispy Kreme Donuts.  How delicious they are, what good marketing campaigns they run, where you can buy them.  And so on… No it wasn’t interesting at all, he was a particularly boring man, but there I was in the airport with time to kill and a big Krispy Kreme Donut stall just across from where I was doing my crossword… Hmmm… And was it yummy, my chocolate-covered Krispy Kreme?  No it was absolutely awful, I am pleased to report.  So glad I didn’t develop an addiction to these transfatty globules.

On the plane at last, four and a half hours; it felt like an eternity.  I have a policy, as I think many people do, of not talking AT ALL to the people next to me.  Pretending they don’t exist, other than to say, Excuse me, when you need to be let out to go to the toilet, and Not a problem, when they have squirted a packet of tomato sauce all over your arm.  Until the pilot has announced the plane is about to land.  Then it is possible to get into happy and animated conversation.  I found that the people sitting next to me were delightful.  The man was from Pakistan, a lecturer in Chemistry at uni in Darwin.  His wife was Italian and a high school teacher.  Loved them!  But so glad I didn’t have to talk to them for four and a half hours…