Unfortunately on Friday night Peg statrted a temp. We still took James and Cat shopping in the morning, which probably was a mistake for Peg. She went to bed and still is there on Sunday morning. However as a result of the shopping expedition James and Cat are now the owners of mobile phones.

Greg and I walked down to the local harbour Saturday afternoon to view some new properties being built.The process is here that they sell you the land and you employ an architect to design your own one-off home. The prices of the land of some 500 - 600 square metres building area is planned to be between 1 and 2.5 million dollars - about 500k to 1million pounds -just for the land! The more expensive ones have a leasehold jetty as part of the deal which would cost you 3,000 pounds per annum.

On Sunday we went to the area just south of Mindarie where a large gap inthe development is being filled in covering a size not too different from Pershore. We looked at the show houses which were all very beautiful with pools and outdoor BBQ areas built in and great internal accomodation.The prices were very reasonable at 300 - 600 dollars (about 150k pounds to 300k pounds) until you realised that this was just the price of the building- the land (anything from a basement of 200k pounds upwards and all the extras such as the pools were to be added on). The process is you buy the land then choose and architect andbuilder . To fund the process you either need to sell your existing property and rent or get two mortgages. The thing that I noted was that these major developments seem to be purely residential homes, so the infrastrucure such as shops, churches, pubs etc are located in other suburbs- I guess my concern would be where is the soul of each new suburb.

Spoke to Emma on Saturday -they now have a rental property so the children can have their own rooms and space. David has had a verbal offer to be Sales Manager for a construction business covering the Rotorua area. he will only be able to take this up when he gets a residency work permit and Emma finishes her training in Wellington which will be late April. Amy, when she finishes her job in France in April /May goes off to the USA where she has a young peoples camp for the summer. Emma's landline number from Easter weekend is 00 64 7870 2935.

We were due to go to Rottnest Island on Monday (which is a 45 minute fast ferry ride from here) but have delayed that till Tuesday in the hope that Peg will be better by then.

Although shops here are closed Sunday, apart from little local shops, unlike UK medical surgeries are open 8 till 2 pm each Saturday and Sunday.

Back to car numbers - as I walked back from the local shop this Sunday morning I was passed by a guy driving one with the reg " 1 FAT WOG" !!

I see from the Rugby results Paddy and Stuart will be happy- seeing Scotland's results makes it surprising that England failed to win there. I await the WRFC result today where I believe Nash and John will be going together with some friends.

Now hopefully for a lazy day watching F1 and sunbathing.

re Claires comment the local supermarket area a few hundred yards away from Greg and Liz's has a drive thru liquor store. I was so confused by this concept that I parked up in a nearby car park and walked in to work out the system. They actually have two lanes - one express where you drive in knowing what you want and one of the assistant delivers it or them and you pay cash. The other lane is the browsing lane where you park up and can wander around and pay by card. Talking of cards - they are more prevelant than even UK. A shop this morning even had somebody buying a paper on the card. Most however still rely on signature with only the occassional use of chip and pin.

Spent two hours Sunday evening from 10pm till midnight reading a book and watching the BBC web site rugby scores on a laptop next to me, the last hour was 10 all wrfc v leeds. I thought the laptop had crashed as the score did not change. At least we did not lose?!

Bryan