DON’T laugh, but it’s raining in Sydney. I travel 12,000 miles to the other end of the earth to escape the snow and am greeted Down Under by thick cloud, steady drizzle and airport workers in anoraks.
Oh look, I DID ask you not to laugh . . .
Anyway, Aussie rain is different. It’s the kind of precipitation those bare-bellied lasses would laugh at on a Saturday neet oot in the Bigg Market. It comes down like thick steam and lowers the temperature gauge to a hardly unbearable 23C.
Frankly, up with that I can happily put. Especially when I recall how the Good Lady and I fled the snowbound Borders a day early to evade the threatened second blizzard the London Met Office was predicting.
Actually, it wasn’t the Met Office warning so much as the Byreman that had us running scared: he and Lady B arrived home tanned and fit from Adelaide’s sun-baked plains three days before Gemma and I were due to fly in the opposite direction.
Naturally, having paid to fly in the posh part of an Emirates jumbo, Byreman and spouse were chauffeur-driven home from Newcastle Airport in fine style . . . until within fifty yards of their front door they were forced to abandon the limo and lug their Louis Vuittons through four feet of drifted snow.
The Byreman viewed my prospects equally bleakly: “Berwick to London should be okay,” said Milfield’s Michael Fish, “and once you get off the ground, London to Sydney will be a doddle.
“No, it’s Crookham to Berwick where you’ll come unstuck. I’d better take you.”
Cattle class it may have been but with the Byreman’s chauffeur service and a special plea to Virgin Atlantic to find me some extra leg space beside the emergency exit my holiday is off to a solid start.
Now if it would just stop raining . . .oh, PLEASE don’t laugh!
LIKE Lot’s wife, I made one mistake at the Heathrow departure gate, sneaking a last look at my emails before being condemned to 22 hours of cramped captivity in the semi-darkness of a Sydney-bound jet.
There it was: an unrefuseable call to action from David Lockie, chairman of my local parish council. Apparently an application has been made to Northumberland County Council to build a 17,500 square foot supermarket in Wooler, with parking for 130 cars.
Aware of potential controversy, the county council was canvassing as many views as possible throughout Glendale. Could my little Tillside email newsletter The Clarion (120 subscribers and rising) help spread the word?
No editor can refuse a call to action such as that!
With the departure gate deadline looming, my pounding fingers dispatched the hot news back up to Godzone country before I raced through the airbridge to my seat.
Mission just possible!
A SPOT of turbulence we ran into over the Bay of Bengal had me recalling that great flying story about the nervous young woman passenger who completely ‘lost it’ when the aircraft hit really rough turbulence and its wing was struck by lightning.
Running to the front of the plane she screamed: “If I'm going to die, I want my last minutes on earth to be memorable!
“Is there anyone on this plane who can make a girl feel like a woman?"
For a moment, there was a shocked silence. Then a man from Newcastle - handsome, tall and well built with dark brown hair and hazel eyes - stood up at the rear of the plane.
Slowly, he started to walk up the aisle, unbuttoning his shirt as he went, one button at a time. Then he removed the shirt. Muscles rippled across his chest.
Awestruck, no one said a word. The woman gasped. Finally, her he-man spoke.
"Iron this, will you? Then get us a beer, pet."
Moral: only a Geordie can make a lass feel like a REAL woman.
First published in The Journal, Newcastle on January 15th, 2010
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