cocky cocky

Up early and out early to head over to the house so I was there as the building inspector went through. Turns out he had inspected the place around 3months ago so knew what to expect. I'm glad I was there because reading the report, which will use words like 'subside' and 'damp' may otherwise have gotten alarm bells ringing a little too loudly. The place is 60 years old and on a slope, it needs a few things doing now and will need a few more later but overall it is unlikely to slip into the back garden and therefore we should still buy it. As for approval for an extension, unlikely to be an issue. Apart from the price, of course.

I'd got to Willoughby early and had breakfast (capuccino, muesli-friut-yoghurt) in the small independant One Earth Cafe on Willoughby Road.. The name conjours up images of the organic goodness they sell. I like the cafes in Sydney and it's suburbs. They open early, a fair few open late and the odd one is 24hours and they do not appear to be homogonised chain efforts. There are, of course, Starbucks and local rival Gloria Jeans, but the high streets are not - yet - all looking exactly the same. You can still grab some munch and a decent (usually very good) coffee from someone who has put something of themself into their place. It is good to have an option other than a pub if you want a late night snack and a coffee and don't feel like witnessing hordes of pissed lads.

Anyway I left the inspector, jumped on a bus to North Sydney (the 273) and from there wandered down to and across the bridge. As I approached the first tower I heard a loud squwaking that sounded like and was a cockatoo. It was sitting on metal beam over the road deck and seemed to be having a whinge at the traffic as it passed underneath. I stopped to take a few pics, in doinf so attracting the attention of one of the security guards whose job it was to ensure I was not a you-know-what hell-bent on bringing down western society blah blah blah. Satisfied that my intentions were good he told me that this bird, and possibly another, so possibly a pair lived in the NE tower of the bridge, seemingly not caring much about the traffic noise. Apparently some rozellas live in there too.

The rest of the walk was quite uneventful and ended with me taking a few pics of painted advertisements on the sides of buildings, an idea stolen from JCJ who is snapping similar at the moment and had mentioned it to me at the weekend.

Via a couple of phone calls - to Sal and her Dad Mike to tell them about the house - I made my way home and prepared for an afternoon run. And it started to get dark. Very dark. And a cloud, like one of those you see in disaster movies, all black and swirling up into the air was building outside and there were a couple of cracks of thunder and it started to absolutely piss down. In London I will run in the rain and get wet; out here I could drown. So I looked at the Bureau of Meteorolgy website radar scan and saw what I already knew - it's raining here - and what I had hopd for - it should pass quickly. And it did. And I'm now off for a run.

And now I'm back and showered and Mara arrived and we drove over to Adam and Munchkin's place in Putney. Putney. One of those semi-obscure place names from Blighty that crop up all over the place in Sydney. Got there and everyone was on good form. Munchkin is pregnant again, Adam looked like he had stepped off a yacht but assured us he had been on the golf course and Maddie - damn cute - was busily distributing and redistributing things. She would pick something up, hand it to me and then get something else ofr Sally, something for Mara, come back to me and take what I had then hand it to Sally, taking the original thing from Sally and...that sort of thing. It must be great being 2. By ten everyone was fading fast, stuffed on surpsingly top-notch chinese food from the unassuming local takeaway (not sure how a takeaway can be unassuming though) and we trundled home in a howling gale. Oh you've gotta love Sydney's weather.