We have mostly been eating pies

Well we had an excellent New Year's - having decided to open our midnight bubbly at about 4pm, we then continued drinking well into the next day. We enjoyed the family fireworks at 9 but decided against the 5 hour sitting in the cold that waiting for the main ones at 12 would have required. I think it is safe to say we were the 'life and soul' of the club, Paul in a good way and me in my usual quite intense, 'on the edge of being scary' way. I fell over, spent a lot of time telling everyone the slightly fuzzy TV screen of the midnight fireworks was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen and was very surprised that when we left the afterparty the next day, everyone wanted to say goodbye because if you'd asked me I would have said I had never seen any of them in my life before. An amazing guy called Greg invited us back to his house from the afterparty for 'as long as we wanted' which, given we were starting to tire of the camper, was very tempting but after one night we hit the road again. We went to Canberra which is a very strange place but it does have the Parliament building that has a grass roof which I found very entertaining to run up and down (I know, small minds). We then had a slightly rubbish time going to places in Victoria with names misleadingly ending in '....Beach' which in this part of Victoria apparently means stinky mudflats. After 3 different 'beaches' and one embarassing breakdown in which half the (admittedly small) town tried to restart us but in fact managed to flood the engine, we decided a drink was called for and ended up in a place called Port Albert. I think it's fair to say Port Albert is not the most sophisticated place - sample local 'character' JimmyFourBalls, the man with the deepest voice in the world - but we did have an excellent, drunken time with the lovely Lisa and Scott (hello if you're reading this!), Paul managed to beat an irritating Northern Barmy Army reject several times at darts and I met a girl who claimed to grow up in Telford (this turned out to be a rather confusing fabrication - a fake childhood in St. Tropez makes sense but Telford?!). The evening ended with me forcing a man whose marriage was collapsing to buy me drink (not that great cos i had to listen to him for ages) and Paul meeting the possible future assassin of John Howard who when not telling us of his constant fantasies of killing the Ozzie PM also informed us he loved black women but unfortunately had 'never met one in real life'. In short, it reminded me of nowhere so much as my home nation of Cornwall. Now we are in Melbourne which is an airy, clean city full of beautiful buildings and sophisticated people so obviously I feel quite out of place.
I have gone on quite long enough but we have managed to squeeze in seeing kangaroos, koalas, wallabies and a slightly less cliched Aussie animal - the fairy penguin. Around a thousand of these incredibly cute birds come ashore each evening on Philip Island to be greeted by a thousand weird looking humans (not that all humans are weird, just the crowd that we were with which included this man who out of nowhere started telling Paul about a girl he had gone out with whose picture he had to hide from his mum for 'obvious reasons'?! and a man who I realised after about 20 minutes was talking in a loud monotone about the huge number of 'penguins'/clumps of seaweed massing in the sea ENTIRELY TO HIMSELF). Most importantly we have got rid of the hideous camper that we both actually found painful to look at by the end of our trip and are looking forward to staying in one place for more than 3 nights for the first time in 4 months. And Tom WE WILL BE BACK IN SEPTEMBER FOR POSSIBLY THE TENTH TIME. And you are very sweet regarding your new girl - can't believe you cringed at my soppiness. Pops - keep up the good work and actually I think you should ban yourself from your own house, I'm sure you standing in the cold begging Freddie to be let in would be entertaining (if not for you). Chris - I think they may be growing on me or it may be cos I have been drunk a lot in the past two weeks.
Love Sophie xxx