Interlude: One Summer's Day.

Summer in South Australia arrived as a drip feed, one day's worth of hot wind at a time.  Roger, attempting to banish his memories of winter cold, pumped as much hot air into the house as he could on the assumption that a death of heat exhaustion would at least confirm that he was no longer cold. "We have to heat up the house!" he cried. "It's going to be freezing cold next week!"  

Along with the hot weather a surprisingly agile blue-tongue lizard appeared in the house, necessitating some reptile-herding combined with keeping Big Fluff at bay.  Big Fluff wasn't quite sure what to do with a blue tongue lizard but all his predatory cat senses went on high alert and he was, should he be allowed to do so, willing to have a solid try at doing whatever his cat senses were telling him to do. We locked him inside as we escorted the lizard into the garden and decided not to think about the fact that where a blue-tongue lizard can gain entry a snake could do likewise.

Shoo, boy.  Out the door before the cat gets you.

We had a couple of days together in Big Fluff's house before I took off to start start another long-term sit in the wilds at the top of the Yorke Peninsula.  We didn't do much.  In the wake of sinus surgery my voice got up and left me, which was the perfect reason to skive off work for the week and take up industrial napping along with honing my sinus-washing skills.  Roger, alas, found himself in the limbo space between being available for work but not actually having any work to do with the resultant hovering around the house doing little bits and pieces and regularly checking emails in case work had arrived while he wasn't looking. 

And then the one warm day arrived so we did what any self-respecting South Australian does and took ourselves off to the beach.  We weren't South Australian enough to swim though.  Not by a long shot!

I don't care if the air is warm.  The water has a much closer connection to Antarctica than it does the tropical north.

Henley Beach was busy: swimmers swam and teenagers performed complicated adolescent courtship rituals before audiences of their peers. Five teenage girls, blissfully risking bikini malfunction, leapt off the rail of the jetty and swam back to the steps to jump again and again. A horde of crabbers busily hauled in pots, carefully measured their catch, and then threw it all back into the sea: it's early in the season and most of the blue swimmers were under legal size.

The Great Sand Debate continues to rage.  The sand moves north, the northern beaches consider the sand theirs, the southern beaches want it back.  Everyone wants a cheap and easy solution which, short of reversing the winds and tides, isn't going to happen.

 

We walked to the Grange jetty and back again with the wind in our faces on the way out and flies in our faces on the way back. Back at Henley beach we celebrated our last meal together* by dining at the pub, which had compensated for summer by turning its air conditioning to winter. That, or the publican didn't want his patrons to linger over their meals and if that was the case it certainly worked for us. Having gobbled our last mouthful we emerged from winter in the pub to discover that the weather change had come through, the wind had turned to a Southerly, and summer had packed its bags and left. A few hardy souls still swam but the majority had taken their wet sandy selves off home and the rest crammed into Henley Square and looked for hot chocolates or went for a meal at the pub under the sad misapprehension that they would be warmer in there.

 

We sat in the car and watched the sun set, but along with the southerly came a bank of clouds approaching from the west, into which the sun sank with nary a shred of colour to herald it's passing.

We went home and fed the cat, keeping a wary eye out for blue-tongue lizards and/or snakes.

*For a week or two. I'm off in the morning to start the next sit, leaving Roger alone with the dual pleasures of cat-brushing duties and visits to the dentist.