Preparing for the Poms

LATE autumn in Melbourne remains a very mixed sort of bag. There are no rustic leaves in piles on the ground or that biting sort of coldness that come hand in hand with the same season in UK and some days can even reach degreeage of 22.

Take today for example. Husband left for work at 4.30am, welcomed to his car by a layer of windscreen frost. This has been the case for a week or two. Or so he tells me. Personally I would have no idea of anything that happens at that time of the new day so I take his word for it.

So, for the walk to school, I got myself togged up in my woolly finest, boots and furry collared gilet that I've been told, on more than one occasion, that I look like a character from the Flintstones. And I'd like to think Wilma more so than Fred....

When we left the house at 8.45am, there was a smattering of dew on the grass and that crisp sort of air that gets deep into your lungs. I'm usually back within 10 minutes so the air ducted heating stayed on to greet me on my return. But by this stage, I'd had a brisk walk in the cool air - in my woolly finest, boots and furry collared gilet - and to open the door to an artificial 30-degree blast had me stripping off sharpish.
The days are bizarre and have me scratching my head at what to cover myself with each day. Just now, I'm on my third change of outfit for the day and before dusk falls, you can be sure I'll be back at the couture starting blocks - all Flintstone-esque.

When I'm chatting to friends and family back there, they're shocked when I tell them it's on the cool side just now. I think the word "Australia" conjurs up images of year-round thermometer busting temperatures with balmy evenings down at the beach.
But down in Victoria, we don't get that endless and bountiful supply of Vitamin D like our neighbours in the north. We simply have to boost our intake with copious amounts of salmon, mackerel and Swiss cheese.

Now we're getting more settled by the minute, we're more than ready to take in our first batch of visitors ... but the timing is all wrong. Without the weather, the beach is pretty much a no-go, without the sun, a visit to the city's ice-bar would be out of the question and without the guarantee of warmth on your bones, who wants to sit on a plane for 21 hours to go somewhere that's climate replicates the one they've just left?

As we wait patiently for spring in September, we look forward to welcoming our first confirmed visitors in October. The golf courses and peninsula wineries will be exhausted by our visits and maybe even the kayak we shipped over will get an airing at the local beach. Bring on the Brits...