Another Prawn etc etc

Two significant developments. First, we have bought a barbecue. Homes here seem incomplete without one in the back garden and summer's setting in so we picked up a modest little number in the hardware shop in the nearby plaza ie a vast shopping centre with a car park so big that you can wander in it for days if you've forgotten which aisle you parked in.

An earlier visit to Barbecues R Us proved overwhelming - I stood mesmerised before the top-of-the-range Beefmaster. With its four burners and two serving tables it stood almost two metres wide and was big enough to roast a cow. We eventually bought a modest two-burner Bondi - named after the famous Sydney beach, it has a wave logo on its wheels - filled our new gas bottle, and used it last night without acquiring burns or food poisoning. Cooking on a barbie is man's work here and you have to drink beer while doing it, straight from the bottle, of course. So I did.

I have also become a member of the Coffs Ex-Services Club. Forget those dingy, backstreet dens we have in the UK. This is huge, white, gleaming edifice in the centre of town with more than 22,000 members. (See Coffs Ex-Services Club) For a mere $11 a year, you get cheap drinks - a round of schooners for myself and my de facto father and brother-in-law comes to less than $10 - cheap food, and free snooker. It's got restaurants, bistros, a number of bars and two halls for gigs. Most towns have something similar. We've started playing snooker once a fortnight, and very badly, too. It's true to say that there's not a great deal of ambiance, but it's clean, smart and well-run. (And if anyone invites you to a bowls club here, there's no need to be surprised. You're not being taken to some wooden hut in the local park where elderly ladies brew tea and cut sandwiches; again, we're talking well-appointed buildings, restaurants and bars and, if you do play bowls, floodlit greens).

How do they do it? The posters extolling "responsible gambling" in the toilets give a clue. In the room next to the four snooker tables, stretching as far as the eye can see, making calamitous electronic noises and flashing fitfully, are the ranks of poker machines, or pokies, reputed to be one of the least successful ways of hanging on to your stake money known to man or woman. But I like the place. It feels unpretentious, and foreign and comfortable at the same time.