Retail therapy Ozzie style

Shopping in Woolworths in Forster this morning. The fascination with Australian products continues and vegetables continue to impress not only with their size and vigour but with the price! Contrary to when we came here four years ago, the exchange rate is not favourable to British visitors, but is very good indeed for Australians travelling to the UK. I have to remember that 1 Australian dollar is equal to about 63p in Sterling, and then guess the price of spring onions that are three times the size of the ones back home.

There’s a store called Bunnings here that is a dead-ringer for B & Q back home. It has the same senior citizen staff in red uniforms, and the layout of the aisles is exactly the same. Granted they have more bug zappers than we do, and a far greater selection of outdoor lights, barbies and pizza ovens, but hey! Otherwise, they’re siblings.

Great excitement watching whales cavorting in the bay this afternoon. Dick was having great fun and we watched him – opinions are divided as to whether he was one whale or two. One, says Helen.

Because today is my birthday we’re celebrating in fine style tonight. I opted for prawns – and here, wouldn’t you know it, they are giant prawns! David and Bill will barbecue them, and we’ve punnets of huge strawberries, Helen’s made a crème brûlée and Bill’s providing the Moet & Chandon. Yeeha!

(I intended to post this on Monday but unfortunately - or fortunately, whichever way you look at it, I got distracted by the prawns! Sorry!)

Retail therapy

St Laurent de Batons

We got back into the swing of things by going shopping this morning. Our excuse, should we need one, is that we wanted a birthday gift for daughter-in-law. It was only after we'd got it that we sort of drifted away into retail madness. M&S in the Gateshead Metrocentre is probably my favourite shop for clothes, and the entire stock seemed to have changed since we went on holiday. I found two blouses and a skirt I liked, and splurged. It's actually the first skirt I've bought in years, because I seem to live life in slacks and jeans. Then it was off to find a new mattrass cover, then off to Lakeland where we bought a potato ricer (dh finds it such a strain to mash potatoes for fish pie!) which satisfied dh's liking for gadgets, and then into Smith's to buy a magazine about laptops.

St Marcel du Perigord

That's where we came unstuck. We bought two things, and each time we were instructed to use the self-service till even though we didn't want to learn how to use it. We like the personal touch, the cheery smile from a sales assistant, and see no pleasure at all in doing it ourselves with some stupid machine. We probably won't patronise W H Smith's ever again until they change their policy.

Then, once we got home, we read the magazine, made a choice between two laptops, checked online and bought a different one. I must have one, without all the entertainment, music and film capability they offer these days. E-mails, internet and Word are what I want for when we go to Australia later this year. My poor old Sony has given faithful service but I've broken it - the hinges shattered one day. The Samsung Notebook I bought dh for Christmas three years ago drove me demented in France because there was so much it couldn't do. The technology has moved on beyond it's capabilities. It couldn't handle loading pics onto my blog very well, which is why you'll see a few more shots of France for the next few days.