Sobering.

So, on a sunny day last week we packed up the Volvo with children, food, drinks and assorted beach paraphernalia (including wetsuits) and headed to a friend's family's beach house an hour out of town. Their shack sits cheek by jowl with others, perched on the edge of the beach with startlingly beautiful water views in the midst of now where. Back in the seventies their mum had had a serious interest in wallpaper with hallways, bathrooms and loos still adorned in the patterns which characterised the time.....matching perfectly with the carpet and the repro Van Gogh sunflowers above the mantlepiece. All a testament to the getting away from it all that shack living offers. A more simple way of life. An escape:

In the lounge room there was a turntable dating back to the time when the boys.....now grown up with their own children....used to work the Hobart party scene as DJ's. So while we drank local wine and had a BBQ lunch consisting of myriad different versions on a salad theme and my husband's home made Roquefort sausages, we took a walk down memory lane by taking it in turns to select records from the box which showcased all the hits from the 70's and 80's. We introduced the children to the Wiggles previous incarnation as The Cockroaches with 'Some Kind of Girl', played Talking Heads in anticipation of David Byrne coming to Mona Foma later in the month, and generally sifted through the Rodney Rude and Mel and Kim albums reminiscing our way through lunch.....while reminding the children not to jump and dance too aggressively next to the record player as they were unused to such prehistoric ways of listening to tunes.

Hidden amongst the box of LP's was 'Strokin' by Clarence Carter....remember?...if not you can refresh your memory here:

I simultaneously wiped the tears from my eyes I was laughing so uncontrollably while thinking that the lyrics really are much more suggestive than I remembered them to be. This song opened the conversational floodgates evoking stories about university college antics (not me), tales of suspension from school for underage drinking (not me)....and bad discoing....OK maybe that was me and other friends will know who I'm referring to.

Then we took the combined 7 children down to the beach where they donned wetsuits and went for a swim.....the adults donned puffas and stood on the sand. It was another perfect day at Connelly's Marsh. We have been fortunate to share many such days with wonderful friends in this particular hamlet as other friends have a family farm and house just across the road.....which has also been the scene of much revelry.

Yesterday, Hobart reached a record temperature of 41.8 degrees and the weather was further whipped into a frenzy by severe winds. Last night, from our upstairs veranda the sky was eerily red over the hills across the river in the direction of the Tasman Peninsula. This morning, we woke to the news that in the early hours both our friends shack and farm were decimated by fire. Both couples had joined us in celebrating the hope and optimism which go hand in hand with New Year's Eve. Mercifully, while they may have lost property and the scene of many happy memories, they and their families are all safe. The beach where the children played last week was from where they were rescued by boat last night as the flames came down to the water. Still the fires on the Peninsula burn uncontrollably. The stories of destruction are truly inconceivable.

Rx