My view and thoughts on everything!

A belated Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year to all.  I hope that everyone had a great New Year celebration and didn’t overindulge in the amber nectar, or drank to extreme from the offerings available from Messrs Walker, Daniels and Beam! Here in Australia the family has been on a two week holiday to see the outlaws (ahem, my in-laws – as my wife hovers over me to see what I am typing!).   Anyway, the outlaws live in Northern NSW and also across the gun-toting border in Queensland.  So getting to see them involved a road trip of 11 hours, with food and restroom breaks, from the Big Smoke that is known as Sydney.  Things in the rural areas of NSW seem to move much slower than in the cities.  At times it feels like time has stood still as nothing really seems to change from one day to the next.  Part of this is due to the weather which is normally stinking hot this time of year, and also due to the “she’ll be right mate” attitude of the friendly ...

"At one stage I had doubled my money to 40p. Wow, I thought, I am rich!...we thought one of the spotters would have a cardiac arrest as three different types of buses all arrived at the same time " Saturday I had the chance to do something very quintessentially English. A trip to the Kent seaside. So off I traipsed with my mother and sister in tow to the exotically named coastal town of Herne Bay. For the uninitiated Herne Bay is situated on the North Kent coast and is sort of where the Thames Estuary starts. It also has a wind farm clearly visible in the distance. The turbines certainly look like something form a Jules Verne novel. Unlike other resorts around the world (Ibiza, Hawaii, Malta, Gold Coast etc) you don't really go to the beach at Herne Bay to get a suntan. That's not to say the sun doesn't shine as it does on the rare hot and sunny summer days. It's just that the beach is typically English and has pebbles instead of sand! Many foreigners find it ...