I’ve had enough – the year’s your lot – my life is becoming too tedious to report interesting and amusing stuff. Thanks for all the comments. K x

Michelle and Amy arrived on Friday 18th and to help them recover from their jet lag John and I took them up to Brooklyn on the Hawkesbury River. We stayed in a massive apartment which was part of a converted convent right on the river. The weekend was low key and low paced, uneventful and relaxing. On the Friday we caught the train up to Brooklyn and ate in a restaurant overlooking the marina. On the Saturday we took the ferry out to Dangar Island, a small inhabited island witha couple of cafes and a bowling green. There is a regular ferry and the islanders keep their wheelbarrows next to the wharf (see picture) so when they bring back supplies they can wheel them to their houses. Whilst eating lunch we were visited by an array of exotic birds who seemed keen to inspect what we were eating, which freaked Amy out somewhat. In the evening we had a BBQ at our apartment and played Monopoly cards. On Sunday the weather wasn’t so good and we headed back to Sydney and met up with Simon and Iwona in Coogee for lunch.

As many of you know I have been tracing my family tree. In the last few weeks I’ve been concentrating on my Grandmother’s (Mary Newton White) family and I’ve found some interesting connections in relation to her aunt, Gladys White.

Gladys’ first marriage was to a Charles Meredith Browne whose parents were Charles Rouse Browne and Matilda Browne. Matilda Browne was the editor and author of a popular women’s fashion journal called ‘Myra’. ‘Myra’ was her pen name that she used when contributing to other publications before starting up her own, including those published by the Beeton family. Her other pen name was ‘Silkworm’. Myra is the focus of many an academic article and book on women’s magazines and women’s fashion at the end of the 19 century, and I have found Matilda listed in the 1920 ‘Who’s Who’ on the back of this publication.

Mrs Beeton, the author of various cook books and household management publications, was a good friend of Matilda’s, so much so that when Mrs Beeton died at the age of 27 after giving birth to her 4th child, Matilda took over the care of her two living children, (Sir) Mayson Moss Beeton and Orchart Samuel Beeton after she died. The 1971 census has Charles and Matilda living with Mayson and Orchart, as well as Mr Samuel Orchart Beeton, but by 1881 their father is also dead, with the Brownes in full responsibility of their care – it seems they packed them off to boarding school.

It’s amazing the information you can glean from rummaging around on the internet! 

Last night I was woken up by John turning his bedside light on in the middle of the night whilst asleep. To top it off he then blocked out the light by covering his head with the duvet. He doesn’t remember me barking at him to turn the light off, and is claiming I made it all up!

No I’m not sick! I had my visa medical yesterday and it didn’t go well. It was a process that lasted almost 2 hours, when really it should have been just 40 minutes. It started with a chest x-ray which was fine – I haven’t managed to get any nasty stuff since my last one 6 months ago. I then went to see a fairly incompetent doctor who I had to instruct on how to fill out the form and what he needed to do. He took my medical history (he wasn’t impressed that I couldn’t remember which of my fingers I fractured when I was nine years old) and tested my ears, eyes, lungs, abdomen and heart. All good.

Then I had to get some blood taken from me so they can do various tests. This took a while as all the nurses wanted to go home and were less than willing. Eventually one nurse offered to do it, however it was a far from pleasant experience. I hate having my blood taken, I can’t stand the thought of it, hence, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve only donated blood once. I’m ok if they just get on with it and I don’t have to look at what’s happening, but unfortunately the nurse seemed hell bent on giving me a running commentary on my veins, switching from arm to arm to locate a good one. Then she stuck the needle in one, but didn’t get any blood out and hit a nerve in the process which was agony, so she went back to my other arm. She found another vein, and this one she got blood out of, but continued with the commentary about veins, blood etc. Then, after only one of the five vials were full, the blood source dried up. The thought of hunting for another vein was too much and I admitted I wasn’t feeling to hot. She laid me down to prevent me fainting and told me that was it - my heart would have sucked all the blood up to it to react to my nearly fainting and she couldn’t get any more blood out of me.

So I’ve got to go back on Monday for more blood syphoning – yikes! I hope I get a different nurse. 

Our spare bed has been somewhat neglected in the past few months, but over the next couple of weeks we’ve got a stream of visitors coming to see us.

This weekend an old school friend of John’s will be passing through Sydney on his return from a wedding 160km from Dubbo (ie very remote NSW). We have a loose arrangement to catch up, but John warns me that if he meets a pretty girl at the wedding it is more than likely that we’ll get unceremoniously dumped.

Then, at the end of the following week the long awaited arrival of my sister and Amy will finally be here. They’ll be staying for a week with us, although for the first two nights we’re heading up to the Hawkesbury River.

At the end of the next week we’ll be exchanging Michelle and Amy for John’s Mum, Kate, at Sydney airport. Kate will be staying with us for a long weekend and we’ve planned a trip to Billy Elliot and a meal at a new restaurant we’ve discovered. That weekend John and I will get to sleep in our spare bed as we have an ‘over 50′ rule for giving up our comfortable bed in exchange for the less comfortable futon – sorry Michelle and Amy.

So you can probably guess what we’ll be doing this weekend – cleaning! In particular we will be finding the spare bed under all our visa paperwork.

Today a Kookaburra visited out balcony. Clearly there isn’t enough old gum trees around. He sat quite regally for a while, surveying the view beyond the balcony. He scarpered when John and I decided to take a picture of him.

John and I have been charging full steam and enthusiastically ahead with the visa process. We’ve been collecting photographs of us from friends and relatives, digging out old correspondance, applying for police certificates to prove we’re of good character and I’ve booked in for an immigration medical check. All was looking good until we called the NZ immigration advice line at 6.30am this morning.

We can’t apply for a partner residency visa until we are able to prove that we’ve been living together for 12 months. Unfortunately we can only really cite the 12 months living together in Sydney because when we were living together in the UK John was officially my tennant, and there’s no real evidence of us living as a couple as all our bills were in my name and what with John’s move to NZ and Oz, and my move to Oz, everything that might have been of use got chucked. The 12 months are up on 29th May, but the snag is we need to provide our passports as part of the visa application  and I’m coming home to the UK for a month on 23rd May and I’ll obviously need to have my passport with me. It seems that they won’t accept anything instead of an actual passport, and they’re likely to want to hold on to it for 4 weeks.

This means that we can’t submit our application until I get back to Oz at the end of June. We’re feeling a little dispondent about it, but also hugely relieved that we turned down John’s Dad’s offer to stay with them in Fiji in July, otherwise it would be another month before we could submit.  We’re hoping that this delay won’t affect our overall planned timescales for our move, we’ll just have less warning between visa application approved (positive, but hopefully realistic thinking) to boarding our flight to Wellington.

John and I have opted for a lazy, stay at home Easter Weekend. We’ve managed to combine being deliciously lazy with being highly organised.

As many of you know, we have opted to go for a partner visa for our move to NZ – ie I apply for residency and John sponsors me in. We decided to dedicate some of the weekend to getting to grips with what we need to do, the timescales asssociated with applying and fishing out all the evidence we need to demonstrate we are in a ‘genuine and stable relationship’. We’ve come up with a list of questions for the NZ immigration dept. The one that has us baffled the most is providing evidence of how we share household duties. Do we take photographs of me cleaning the bathroom and John taking the recycling out? Do we mock up a rota system? Any suggestions out there?

Other than visa stuff, we’ve had brunch in our favourite cafes everyday, played golf twice, watched the F1, watched the NZ v England cricket, watched the NZ Warriors v the Parramatta Eels, and went to the cinema to see ‘Brick Lane’. We also planned on going for a walk in a national park south of Sydney, but so far every day I’ve dismissed the idea along with some rather flimsy excuse – there’s still Easter Monday to go!

No prizes for guessing what I was doing this weekend. 

Wales wins the 6 Nations Grand Slam – Hurrah! I want Welsh cakes and daffodils to celebrate but there are none to be had.

The F1 season was kicked off with Lewis Hamilton winning and McLaren at the top of the table – Hurrah, hurrah and hurrah!

And, according to John, the rugby league season has started and Man U are top of the table with a game in hand.

In terms of my own sporting brilliance, my golf drive has improved (oh so slightly).