Ten Years Of Unremitting Joy and Happiness Having Been Made Official

On Midwinter's Day ten short years ago Nicole looked me in the eye, thought "Oh Shit" and broke down in tears. But there were people watching and she couldn't very well turn back, what with me in my specially bought clean suit and everything, and all that food to be eaten. And her being up the duff!

Still in those ten short years, following the seven previous ones, we've made a few changes, just little things like getting degrees, changing jobs, having a child, looking after the child, challenging traditional gender roles, having another child, looking after that child, oh - did I forget moving to another country? Or becoming a Master of whatever it is? Or finally getting a sun-tan?

On Midsummer's Day Nicole found time in her busy schedule for us to having a small celebration of our Anniversary. We went up to the beach at Moolooloolababa where we re-lived old times with the dogs, only without them. The tide was low and the rock pools at Point Cartwright warm, as they say, as a bath.

I watched the girls pussyfoot around the Ocean's gurgling edge. Nicole made a pretty decent attempt at drowning Lyra, but she put it behind her pretty quickly. A nice man suggested that we might like to move away from the rocks as there was a "wicked rip," whatever that is.

So tempting was the sea that I decided not to trek back to the car to get my togs (as we call them now, rather than trunks, or dare I say dookers), instead just stripping down to my smallclothes there on the beach and leaping with gay abandon into the swell with Eloise aghast at my brazen behaviour.

We discussed the mechanics of hydrodynamic currents as we bobbed in the waves before they crashed gently on upon another. The seabed was soft and sandy and shallow and though the waves became higher we could still touch the bottom. Eloise thought she could feel things nibbling on her legs, or maybe jellyfish, but in fact all was happening really was that her unprotected back was surreptitiously pinking up nicely.

We drove up to Alex Heads for a bite to eat and ended up dining with the Common Man at the Surf Club, negotiating a Byzantine neo-Communist retail experience which saw us escorted to our table by what seemed to all intents and purposes to be a waiter, but informed by the bar staff we visited when our table failed to be waited upon that no waiter service was provided. Instead we had to order our food from a counter, unless it was restaurant food in which case a second counter needed to be visited, and our drinks from the bar, unless they were 'beverages' in which case a third counter was the place to order, all of which was paid for separately. Food was delivered to the table, but I neglected to ask the exact title these people enjoyed.

Of course we over-ordered on the pizza, pasta, bruschetta and chips. It was the bruschetta that really finished us off. Lyra greatly enjoyed the whack-a-frog-mercilessly-on-the-head game, even though she was crap at it.