And life goes on

So I didn’t quite make it to the end of blogging about our holidays because news broke of the ferocious bush fires in Victoria and I didn’t feel quite right about writing about what a fabulous time we’d had on holiday while hundreds of people were either dying or being made homeless.

Needless to say Australia has been in something of a state of shock since two weekends ago when the number of fatalities from the fires reached more than double the number of the previous worst ever fires. There’s been some speculation about different reasons for this year’s unprecedented level of death and destruction but no real conclusions other than it’s been a fairly horrible amalgamation of different factors – hottest summer on record, longest drought for a while, not enough management of the bush which has meant a big pile of fuel just building up, questions about the preparedness of communities, and the sad fact that some fires were started deliberately.

Today was a national day of mourning and there has been a huge amount of aid donated to help those affected. Whether lessons will be learned and future similar disasters avoided remains to be seen.

Anyway, lives in Sydney have pretty much been going on as normal - Victoria seems very far away really – ours included. Last weekend we attempted, for the second time, to go diving up the New South Wales coast. And for the second time we were foiled by very heavy rain and weather too bad for boats to go out. We did manage to do a shore dive – where you walk in from the beach and dive about 20m or so out – but even that was miserable and involved a few scary moments of trying to put fins etc on in waves that were big enough and strong enough to knock all 100kg and 2m of Kevin over – so you can imagine what they did to me!

It was very strange to be in that kind of weather, knowing that fires were still raging in Victoria…

This weekend has been nice and quiet after a fairly busy week of social events including leaving drinks for a pal from work on Friday – never good to finish the night in a pub called the Scary Canary!

Some banal facts of the week:

Ran three times, 100 mins in total, so probably about 10 miles – quite pleased.

Cooked a very nice chicken curry during the week and now trying a potato & green bean one, yum.

Went to a ‘forum theatre’ production with few people from work, put on by Milk Crate Theatre, which works with homeless people in Sydney. Involves telling someone’s life story with audience contributions & suggestions for where doing things differently might have led to a different ending. Audience mostly homeless or ex-homeless people.

Currently reading Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (struggling to get into it) and The Choice of Hercules by A C Grayling (good so far).

Managed to do most of cryptic crossword in this week’s Guardian Weekly – not managed one of those for about 5 years – not sure if this is good or bad thing!?!