“Does that mean we are never moving back to the UK?” some of you may ask. Well, the answer I’ll give is “Never say never” and “who knows what’s round the corner?” I moved out here for an intended duration of six months and here I am still, having had my four year anniversary of landing in Sydney just yesterday! One thing I have learnt is that the only constant in Life is change. Things rarely turn out the way we plan and my ultimate goal is to live with my feet planted firmly in the Present and embrace every moment.

Ok, so enough of the philosophy and on with the pictures.

Firstly we have a video that Mat took when we inspected the unit again before putting in an offer. As you can see, Mat is especially excited at having twin sinks in the bathroom!

The lounge/dining room

The lounge area facing the balcony

The lounge area and "study nook" ot the left of entrance door

Another angle of the dining area/lounge

The balcony - not massive but bigger than most we looked at.

The kitchen - tidy and 1.5 sinks (though a double may have to go on list of improvments)

The main bedroom - a very good size.

The second bedroom - perfect for a nipper or two when we get around to it but will do for guests until then.

The bathroom - probably the only room in need of a reno at some point but certainly not desparate.

The layout plan

So, it’s not a palace, not even a house in fact, but for a larger than average 2 bed unit (flat for those in the UK) on the Northern Beaches with internal laundry and double garage we got a pretty good deal and it’s certainly a good rung or so on the ladder!

It’s not in Avalon but just ten minutes down the road in Newport, before The Bends so you will no longer require a passport to visit It will take me half the time to get to work and at the west end of Queens Parade it’s within stumbling distance of The Newport Arms which will be nice now the Summer is here.

The animation is by another French artist, Yannick Puig, and I think it is the combination of the music and the video that make this piece so stunning, compelling me to play it over and over again and write a random blog post on it.

The animation represents so much that I love about art. This guy has awesome talent and has joined my list of artists that ignite passion. He has a very interesting web page on the making of this video; an explanation of the story, how he and Kwoon shared common points that made for a perfect match and his love for insects, plants and the mineral kingdom that feed his well of inspiration.

I was interested to find out what music genre Kwoon fell into as I am not very learned in these things and after googling it was surprised to discover a knew one: Post-rock! That’s one I never would have guessed.

I never feel I am very articulate when it comes to expressing how I feel about something but after reading some of the comments from YouTube I think enli85 says it all:
“Whats better … Song or video – i realy cant decide – but both of them are piece’s of art, and mixed together ? …Good Lord. Oscar.”

After leaving a little late and then queuing for half an hour to buy t-shirts we missed the support band, Jet, unfortunately. I then queued for another fifteen minutes to buy chips and pies as we hadn’t had any food before leaving and were both pretty hungry. However, it was all timed really well because as we were just finishing the last chips the lights dimmed and the crowd errupted.

The first thing I noticed was, even though the tickets said no photography or filming equipment allowed, there were camera flashes going off left right and centre. I’m glad I had decided to take my camera anyway and I took a few shots and video clips here and there to capture the moment. We had pretty good seats; although they were right at the side of the stage, so the acoustics weren’t as good as they would have been in the centre, we were at the front of the first level above ground so got a really good view of everything.

The whole concert was absolutely fantastic. Billie Joe was a real showman and kept the crowd constantly hyped. They played a lot of songs off their new album, 21st Century Breakdown, at least the same again from American Idiot and a whole heap of other classic old school Green Day tracks. They also did parts of some random covers including ACDC and The Beatles.

As well as the music Billie Joe kept picking random audience members to come up on stage. A couple of them were just got up for the experience, needless to say Billie Joe looked like he was half strangled by one chick who was a bit over enthusiastic (well who wouldn’t be?). Then he got a kiddie up on stage for one of the new songs, East Jesus Nowhere, which envolved absolving him of his sins and ended in big pyrotechnic explosion. I took a video of this but I still haven’t managed to find a way of converting my mov files to avi small enough to upload to youtube without the quality dropping to shit so I’ve pinched someone elses:

He got a couple of people on stage to squirt water from super soakers at the mosh pit and then continued squirting the crowd intermittantly throughout the rest of the night from a hose. He also had a rather funky contraption that had a bog roll and some sort of air gun attachment which launched toilet paper into the crowd in long streams. Then he had a t-shirt gun, like a spud gun but which fired rolled up t-shirts into the audience; about ten lucky people managed to bag one of those. He had a couple of people up on stage to sing with him after making them promise faithfully that they knew all the words. The first guy was bloody good and did the whole dancing about the stage thing at the same time. There was countless numbers of explosions and fire jets that never ceased to make me jump every time. When a couple of the people left the stage he got them to launch themselves into the mosh pit which was pretty cool; it always amazes me how they seem to float along over everybody’s heads without seeming to hurt anyone, especially when they first land.

Here’s one from the beginning of the night “Know Your Enemy”, again, I’ve pinched it from a lovely person that must have been sat somewhere near where we were as the angle is the same:

At one point in between songs Bille Joe left the stage and went out into the middle of the audience to greet random fans (see picture three). The list goes on and on. They didn’t disappoint at the end either; the whole band came back on for several songs after their initial departure and then Billie Joe came back on again after that and finished with some glorious acoustic classics. Here’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”:

All up Green Day played for a solid two and half hours and it was definitely up there at the top with my all time favourite gigs. It took nearly two days for my ears to go back to normal afterwards!

Fantastic night! Thank you Green Day

As soon as I heard this on the radio I decided this would be one concert Mat and I would not miss out on (previously being too late to score Neil Young tickets and also dibbing out on the Foo Fighters back in 2007). Tickets went on sale at 9am on 30 June and as Mat was off sick with food poisoning I was able to persuade him out of his sick bed long enough to hound the website until he had secured a pair

Here is sample. This is their current single in the charts from the new album:

After spending a couple of days in Clydach with Chris et al, me Mat and Seb left on Thursday morning (23/5/09). We decided, as pre planned, to take a slight detour on the way home via Cardiff Bay so we could have a look at where Torchwood (off shoot from Dr Who starring the enigmatic Captain Jack Harkness as the main character) is filmed and take a load of pictures of the famous water tower.

We were a bit worried about finding the place as we didn’t have a map but we pretty much found our way straight there and then parked up in a muti-storey just down the road from the National Assembly for Wales building.

As you can see by the two pictures of Mat and me, then Seb and Mat, standing in front of the water tower on “the step”, the perception filter was clearly out of order that day, lol. Though on closer inspection, in all the photos I have, someone has always got at least a bit of their foot overlapping a neighbouring step, so perhaps this is why we were not invisible as we should have been.

I was pretty impressed with the third photo; after taking lots of different shots trying to get an artistic composition of the tower without making it look boring, quite by chance, the gull had flown across this shot at exactly the right moment. The tower isn’t quite vertical (tisk) and I couldn’t correct this without chopping off the top of it which is clearly unthinkable. Perhaps the seemingly backward lean adds to the impression of size and power or something?..

Here we have the Millenium Centre showing the words “In These Stones, Horizons Sing”, the title of a work of music composed by Karl Jenkins which was commissioned for the opening of the Wales Millenium Centre. The English is not a direct translation of the Welsh as is proabably assumed. ‘Creu Gwir fel Gwydr o Ffwrnais Awen’ directly transated means ‘Creating truth like glass from inspiration’s furnace’. A full explanation can be found here.

Once we’d taken enough pictures we went and had a bite to eat in Mermaid Quay before making our way back to the car and home. It was cool to be able to see the actual place of Torchwood, even if it is just a sci-fi TV series. Mat and I have both been reading the books too, so you could say we are Torchwood anoraks. We can’t wait for the thrid series to start: Children of Earth. Though unfortunately it’s only going to be five episodes long which is a bit disappointing. Still, I noticed on Amazon that another three books have just been published so I will have to get ordering those. In the mean time here is a trailer for the upcoming series:

This time I was determined to conquer my fear of heights and go for it, as nothing could be as bad as the fifty metre Diamond fire lookout tree I climbed in Western Australia, which I am yet to write about. The Blowhole is located on the south cliff of Warriewood beach and is a tunnel going all the way through the cliff which you can swim through. You get to it by walking through a reserve and ignoring the danger sign that warns of a dangerous cliff edge and advises to keep away etc. etc. There is a path that goes down to the cliff and then all the way round the cliff to the other side. To get down to the blowhole you have to climb down two ropes onto ledges further down the cliff which then enable you to scramble down to it.

There is then a little ledge about fifteen feet above the narrow inlet that you can jump off, into the water, making sure you time it correctly so you jump into a wave as it comes through. I think you have to be careful about height of the tide as well, but it was fine when we got there. The rope descent was no where near as bad as I thought it would be and in actual fact was dead easy.

Here you can see Mat preparing to jum off the ledge into the water with Nick and Kat in the background. The second picture shows the height of the cliff behind and also some people in the background climbing up the bottom rope:

Here you can see the swell from a big wave errrupting through the blowhole and the second picture shows a closeup of the bottom rope ascent (it gets a bit scarier on the top rope as it’s a bit longer and higher up):

I’m afraid to say I wimped out of the little jump and just got in off the side. I didn’t swim through the blowhole either as I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t get thrown against the rock whilst inside as the waves seemed very strong, even though Mat and Nick went through and said it was fine. This said, I was a bit surprised at how tame the jump was as we’d heard stories about it being very dangerous and having to know what you are dong as far as the tide is concerned.

It wasn’t until we climbed back up and around the cliff to the north side of the blowhole that I understood. We met a group of lads all clustering round a sheer drop and realised that this was the dangerous jump – fifteen metres, not fifteen feet, into the sea at the other side of the blowhole. We watched a couple of them jump off and then went on our way.

I think next time I will definitely do the small jump as it really wasn’t very high at all. I just wish Chris and Tom were still here as they would be mad enough to do the big one for sure (we only discovered the blowhole after they had both gone back to the UK).

On googling “Warriewood Blowhole” I found this Myspace video of some local lads doing the big jump, together with some amusing commentary:

Video taken from the myspace.com page of JG

This video from youtube shows some more big jumps and people doing the smaller one as well:

Video taken from the youtube.com page of iitchbae

Going the same time daily (just before 7.30am) it has been interesting to observe the slowly rising tide each day. The beaches here are nothing like the ones in the UK with their vast difference between low and high tide. I haven’t ever noticed much difference in amount of beach to the sea unlike Britain where you might need binoculars to see the sea at low tide.

On Monday the rock baths were like normal swimming pools with only the occasional big wave causing a little splash at the end. Tuesday and Wednesday saw a lot of seaweed gathering on the bottom of the far end where it had been washed in. So much so that instead of doing lengths I did widths at the nearest end to avoid getting it all wrapped round me, not to mention the unpleasant tickling sensation that made me wonder if it was something else creepy crawly like.

On Thursday the waves were more ferocious, sweeping over the pool edges and causing the water to swirl about in conflicting directions. I found myself racing the last couple of metres at the end so I could turn round before another wave threatened to hit me in the face. That was nothing compared to Friday though; as I walked down the beach I could see the level of the water had submerged the path leading to the baths and instead of putting my things on the stone bench at the side I followed others’ examples and left them on a sheltered ledge of rock further up.

It was like swiming in a washing machine. Waves were coming in from the bottom then hitting the wall and coming back again meeting more waves and clashing in the middle. I had to be careful not to swim too near the edge incase I got swept against the sides. After I got out I took this mini video:

What I really like about swimming in the rock baths is the raw experience of the elements. It’s all there: the air around you, especially when it’s windy; the fire from the sun, even in the early morning it can be very powerful; the sea and the waves encapsulating you in water; and the surrounding rock and cliffs for earth.

I find it a very powerful experience and go to work feeling charged and full of energy. Nature’s energy is all around us and I think if you stop and take notice of it, you can tap into it and absorb it into your own energy field. It’s like an infinite reserve available to everyone if you know it’s there, consciously or not.

After Mat had left and I was just about to go into the kitchen to have some breakfast I realised I could hear a strange pattering of small feet on our balcony. It sounded like a small band of gnomes having a party out by the barbequeue so naturally I went to investigate. This is what met my eyes:

[click on the thumbnails to enlarge each image]

Of course I ran to get my camera and took as many pictures as I could before the battery went dead. At first I was worried they would all fly off on sight of me but unlike the other birds I try and photograph these cockatoos were true to their nickname – cocky! I was able to get up very close, within a foot from their faces, though I was not willing to try any closer due to their very strong beaks. When I used to try and stroke the lorikeets back in Collaroy they would give me little warning pecks and the thought of a cockatoo doing the same when their beaks have the equivalent strength of a Staffie’s jaws and could sever a finger with ease made me a bit more respectful.

I was quite pleased with these photos, especially the “pair of cockies”, hence adding this post to my photography category as well as general pictures. The morning was a little cloudy unfortunately and due to the whiteness of the cockies’ plumage the photos are slightly ‘blown out’. All good practice nonetheless.

Occasionally they would get a bit rowdy and start squawking at each other. It’s an awsome noise and when they do it in mid-flight as they pass overhead it makes me think of how terradactyls might have sounded like back in the day, very primaeval.

I captured this video clip as I disturbed them coming out of the bedroom door:

Fortunately, since Monday I have not been prematurely disturbed from my sleep by any noisy birds so I must have just been extra sensitive due to the stress of the move and tiredness. I’m guessing the people who lived here before us must have got into the habit of feeding the cockatoos, hence their invasion to see if the new residents had anything to offer.

We will not be feeding any cockatoos though; I have heard stories about people going on holiday and coming back to find their balcony ripped to shreds by the cockatoos out of shear spite, incensed by the fact that their feeders dared to abandom them for a week or two. Whether there is any truth to the stories or not, I am not willing to find out.

I mentioned back in October that we had a pair of Currawongs nesting in a neighbouring palm tree and they kept visiting our balcony for extra food.

Well, not long after that, Baby left the nest. Mat noticed that the incessant cawing was no long coming from the top of the palm tree but from the bottom and when we looked we could no longer see the big black blob amongst the fronds. Mat was a bit worried that Baby had fallen out of the nest and was unable to fly but I assured him it would be ok; I had just recently read an article in the local paper about WIRES (The NSW Wildlife Information, Rescue & Education Service) being inundated with baby currawongs and magpies where poeple had thought they’d fallen out of the nest by accident and needed “rescuing”. Wires sent out a plea to leave them where they fell as it was completely normal and all part of their flying lessons.

By the evening we were relieved to hear Baby cawing from the safety of our Umbrella tree at the bottom of the garden and from there, there was no stopping him. He is a very noisy baby and even now, two months later there is no sign of the distinctive “currawock, currawong” adult call that presumably gives them their name. He just continues cawing repeatedly for food and can be heard from various surrounding trees regularly throughout the day. Saying that, I think this last week must have been a turning point as I haven’t heard him for a while now. Maybe he has finally taken off to find himself his own terriory away from mum and dad.

Anyway, for the first time last week, Mum (or maybe it was Dad) brought Baby with them to visit our balcony. He started screeching at the top of his voice for food and Mum started tearing up bits of bread for him. I quickly snatched up my camera and started to film through the closed glass door but as always, for some reason they got camera shy and flew off.

It doesn’t show much and you can’t even hear Baby’s sqwarking through the closed door and over Mat and Kat chattering in the background. However, you can see how big Baby is now (on the left). He doesn’t have much baby fluff left and you can just see a bit of yellow still left round his beak (not in the video).

I have missed Baby this week but Mum and Dad have started coming back to the balcony (something they didn’t do as much once Baby had left the nest) and harrassing the ‘Reets’ for their food so it looks like things are starting to go back to normal.

I wonder if they will miss us when we are gone…[sigh]