The rest of us can only sigh wistfully at the prospect of being as cool as the Fug Yourself girls: http://gofugyourself.typepad.com/ Gold. Gold. Gold. Gold. Gold.

It's the Saturday before Easter. We sit underneath the Jacaranda in the late afternoon and play Scrabble on a table stained with bird shit. In between turns there's the valley as the view. Noonie throws a tennis ball for Pickle and eventually he comes across a brown and white rabbit on the lawn. It's large and fluffy and gorgeous and dead. Not a mark on it. Couldn't face another Easter we joke.

I think of other Easters. A sunny Sunday in Rome after days of rain. Christ is risen. Hordes of Italians framed by bouganvillea on the Spanish Steps, and still more in the shops on Via Condotti. Before that as a kid there was part of an Easter Sunday spent trapped in the toilet with the door handle broken. I was wearing navy and white stripey knee-high socks. More rain at Smiths Lake years later and a game of Monopoly stopped ubruptly so one, fearing they'd been duped, could read the rules in entirety. Rain again at...Sunshine Beach before everyone was married with children. Forresters Beach. Rain. Too small house. Not enough couches. Lee's humour only consolation and prevention from cabin fever.

Spam as Poetry

I'm paying the price of living life at the limit.
Round the corner every morning just to see who gets across.
Invisible.
You woke me up just to check that I'm alive.
Despondent.
By suicidal fair lectern, asphyxiation incubation. Period.
Gaggle in community center the campaign of resurrected beggar of tongue-tied asylum as splash-sports.
Is deft to bamboozle a politician.
I'm a professional cynic, but my heart's not in it.
Piteous and callousness is knockdown and dragout: a languid gravel and this spot they are as boundary crew cut the lad at the isolated foam rubber job, with workload.
Sergeant major of the neighbourhood is weighing up the cost.
Seating that insidious to snowboarding the frantically adjacent caricature, practically as a backup.
And they're digging up the road and widening it just so you can suffocate at home.
Connotation is fatherhood, misconception, mathematics. Pardon?

Buster arthritically bunny hops flight after flight of stairs as the shade chases us down the cliff towards the beach. It's been an afternoon of slow roasted lamb, couscous and red wine while watching sea stained brown with sand churned towards the top. On the way we make a pact not to tell them that we stopped at McDonalds to feed our hangovers, but it doesn't matter: the lamb too good and our hangovers very hungry. We all have seconds, and then almond cake.

Before the beach we pass a tent in a clearing and Danielle says it's been there for days. She says that she heard them doing circle work last night, the hooligans, and there is tyre track evidence.

We're only walking on the sand but within minutes LT is swamped by a wave and wet trousers cling to her calves. Warwick's camera is new and the best shot is of Andreas holding a string of amber seaweed up to his chin, like a beard. It echoes the ZZ Top version he plans to grow in time for his fiftieth birthday.

On the beach, Buster is a different dog, forgetting his achy spine. He runs with a stick and we throw it for him a couple of times. We walk to the point where the shade of the headland has come across the beach and they stop to chat to a local. It's only been minutes but the shadow has raced along the sand and we head back towards the sunshine, past the man with the kite, and collect our shoes.

At the clearing we notice clothes strewn up on shrubs by the tent. It seems deserted and we play at detective and talk about alerting the local authorities. There's a heavy spanner on the ground in the centre of the doughnut. Andreas unzips the tent's door and we peer in. There's bedding and a back-pack and a red petrol can, and it looks kind of messy.

The police don't come out here they say. A while ago, when someone was throwing rocks at the house they phoned the police but they didn't come. They just called back a couple of days later to make sure that everything was alright. It's policing from a distance. Andreas says he likes it that way when he's driving.

LT's Birthday Dinner

We're packed in to an orange room on the first floor, shuffling chairs to preserve a path as more and more people arrive. On the wall it says "fishcakes" and there's a drawing of a fish in blue and green chalk. I can't remember how much they are.

We see Prue at the top of the stairs and in front of her is a waiter holding a male mannequin around the waist. The mannequin - let's call him Pierre - is perpetually sitting and the path doesn't stretch to that kind of access so they pass him over the dinner tables to LT and the Scottish friends called Graham near the window. I mistakenly think that it's a birthday gift and wonder where the hell they will put Pierre in their apartment. Turns out that he's hired so Prue can take a series of photographs. He's $40 a week but if anything happens to him he costs $800 to replace. Later in the evening Pierre's arm falls off as he's being passed back over tables. It lingers for a moment over the flaming main course and I wonder how much it is to replace just an arm. Soon it slides off the table taking with it a bottle of red wine and Prue is able to pick it up and reconnect it without too much trouble. After that Pierre sits alone at the spare table behind us. In his checked faux western shirt he looks like he's a local. He even has his own bottle of wine for a while, but then we need to drink it.

Prue says she's going to take Pierre to Armidale and put him on a horse to take some photos. I don't think the horse will like it, but I don't say anything.

The waiter shows us how to put the rice noodle rolls together, but once he's gone we all try to stuff too much in them and they don't work any more.

The cousin from Wellington via England tells me that somewhat disappointingly Wellington is not really very windy. In fact, the airport got closed five times last year because of fog. Later Lisa tells me that he hunts things, this cousin, and that her Inverness friends used to think him exotic, which worked a lot in his favour. Warwick says that the cousin told him he takes his lesbian colleague to strip joints to watch girl on girl action. I wonder if my investigative conversation skills are lacking.

When it's time to leave we take Pierre downstairs and sit him behind a pot plant while Prue goes to get her car. He doesn't fit in the front seat so she shoves him head first into the back, and then we all head off to Kuletos.

Two lines

Man: Why are you wearing double denim?
Woman: Yes

Death of Pegasus

It happened last week. Death by washing machine of a treasured accessory. If it was just that the brooch pin had come unstuck, then of course it could be remedied. But what is the power of Pegasus without forelegs lashing out? I guess it's technically the wings that are most important but I'd be unsure of his ability to deliver that thunder sans forelegs. And it would be difficult to create the fountain of Hippocrene by striking his hoof on the ground, when actually that hoof is somewhere in the bowels of my Fisher and Paykel.

Get Your Sic Straight

Noonie's "Did I tell you that I almost choked on a kebab in WA?" was pipped at the last minute by Andrew's mortification at my (sic)ing him (bound to become a verb any minute now) as the natural title for this blog.

Mentions should go to LT, though, for "And I just wanted to ask her: how often do people call you a trollop?" or something similar in relation to Alannah Hill, and someone's Uncle Richie who was this weekend being welcomed back into the fold after ostracision resulting from a dispute over his father's will or an affair with his niece. Ironically, he wasn't just saying that, she was his niece. I can't remember which it was that actually caused the estrangement, but it's certainly not a great track record.

With all this weekend action, walking back across the park in the highest shoes I own and a borrowed jumper (thanks Gina) over yesterday's clothes, at the same time clutching Scrabble under my arm doesn't really feature.