Dear all,
Thanks for the cards and the presents, just thought I’d drop you a line and a couple of photos to tell you about our Christmas.
It’s been absolutely roasting here, 43 on Christmas day and over 44 on Boxing Day; definitely the hottest Christmas we can remember.
It doesn’t matter how long I live here, Christmas just isn’t the same in a hot country. It’s all very nice to have hot weather and go to the beach, and have barbeques, but just for those few days over Christmas with Santa and his sleigh and reindeers, well it has to be cold, I think.
They try very hard to get into the spirit of things here in Australia. The city has lots of Christmas trees and illuminations and every year they have the Christmas pageant through the streets of Perth, lots of seasonal floats and dancing troupes.
In most suburbs they have carols by candlelight, in the local park, on the Sunday before Christmas. The kids all love this, everyone takes a blanket to sit on and candles to light and there is carol singing, usually accompanied by a small band and the evening is rounded off with a fireworks display.
Christmas day we went up to Sarah’s and took the presents for the grandkids, the dresses you sent for the girls all fitted perfectly, they loved them, you know the clothes you send from England always seem to be better quality than the ones we get here, your shops must know better Chinese suppliers than our shops, ha ha.
Sarah cooked the full Christmas dinner, roast turkey, potatoes, sprouts, plum pudding with custard, the whole show, good job they have air conditioning because all that cooking heats the house up. Then after that lot had settled we had a few beers and went for a swim in the pool, it was like a warm bath, they have a thermometer in the pool and it showed the water temperature was around 30deg, C.
Boxing day we went to visit Gwen and John; they are some friends that we know from the quiz night that we go to on a Wednesday night. They have been here for a long time and come from Swansea originally. There were 2 other couples at their house, one couple from the east end of London, who have only been back to England twice in 26 years, once for a wedding and once for a funeral. And the last couple Colin and Pam are from Yorkshire (well no one's perfect) and we see them every week at the quiz night as well.
It sounds like we only have English friends doesn’t it? But that’s not the case; we know lots of Scots too, ha ha. No really, we do have Aussie friends and we don’t set out to make English friends on purpose. It just seems to work out that way, probably because we meet people in pubs and that seems to be more of an English thing.
We arrived at Gwen’s about one o’clock in the afternoon and they said on the car radio on the way down that it had just gone over 44 degrees. We kept cool in the shade of the pergola, and pigged out on a lovely cold buffet which Gwen had put on, followed by a few beers and a dip in the pool, that sounds familiar doesn’t it?
Well it’s a lot cooler today, about 32 deg. Which is good for the garden, the rhubarb was looking a bit frazzled but the broccoli is doing magnificently. I’m off for 2 weeks starting back on the 7th and all the school kids are off until the beginning of Feb. this being the main summer holiday for them.
So that’s about all the Christmas news for this year, have a happy new year and I'll write again soon.
Cheers, Trevor
Ps. The post Christmas sales start today so we’re off down to the shopping centre to do some more damage to the credit card. Well at least its airconditioned in there.
See ya
- Post to:
del.icio.us
Digg
Newsvine
Nowpublic
Reddit