Lots of people have trained falcons to sit on a glove. How many people do you know can do this with a chicken?
Two of Julie's chickens are living outside my backdoor and she often has to move them about. The rooster has turned out to be unusually tractable and with very little effort she has trained him to stand on her wrist while she walks from one part of the yard to another.
She is planning next to train him to perch on her shoulder so she can have both hands free. I must get a video of that when he learns his new trick.
You will remember that I was apprehensive about the barbecue on Sunday. The weather forecast was worrying. We took all the precautions we could at home, even making a special detour to move the chickens from the back door into a shady nook in the backyard, before setting off across the river.
Drove across the Tasman Bridge, through Lindisfarne and turned towards Rokeby, then up a side road through the gum trees. It was fine and sunny but not unbearably oppressive yet. We found our way to the right address, notable for the number of cars parked in the bushland around the house. In the shade of some of the taller trees, the members of our congregation were lolling about consuming sausages, salads and punch.
The afternoon unwound pleasantly enough. The lady of the house and Julie trekked across to the hen house to inspect the new additions to the chicken population resulting from last week's trip to the poultry farm. I trailed after them, though I don't know a Polish from a Rhode Island Red. Then it seemed to be growing warmer and we moved inside into the living room, where we divided our time between jostling for position in front of the electric fan and casting about for a lost contact lens.
When we finally set off for home, the air seemed to be charged with heat. As soon as we stepped outside I could feel the perspiration start from my pores. Down the side road and back on to the highway, with the windows down for maximum ventilation. ("Is the bonnet supposed to wobble like that when we hit 100kph?")
The heat got worse every mile. As we came through Bellerive, we saw the traffic banking up in the road leading to the Tasman Bridge. "I'm not sitting in a traffic jam in this heat," said my sister decisively as she swung the steering wheel. "We'll circle round to the Bowen Bridge.":
It took a few minutes extra, but we were thankful to avoid the trail-back of cars. We felt washed-out by the time we reached my house, and no wonder - while we were on the road, the mercury had hit 39° on the Celsius scale (a blistering 102°F in the old measurements!).
We checked the animals were all right (the cat went outside then came back and stretched out on the coolness of the linoleum floor in the kitchen) then I lay down for an hour to recover my strength.
Surprisingly, the temperature dropped steadily after that and it started to rain lightly about 9 p.m. It must have dropped twenty degrees by the time I went to bed that night. I was afraid that might mean a storm but apart from a single bolt of lightning around midnight things seemed fairly normal.
I don't think I've seen a day as hot as this one for about twenty years; I ended the evening sleeping naked under a sheet, exhausted from the extreme temperatures.
There were about twenty bushfires around the state, but they were all under control by Monday except for the one near Zeehan on the west coast. It was warm in the afternoon but nothing like it was on Sunday.
Is it just me or is the Australian Open tennis dragging on even longer than usual? I know nothing about tennis championships, but this one seems to be going on forever.
I'm not bothered by it normally, but they tend to give it priority on the ABC radio, disrupting a lot of my favourite programmes. Curiously, it seems not all radio stations are taking the tennis broadcast, so many of the shows are still going out as normal over the Internet. I was able to hear The Idlers and The Coodabeen Champions normally on the web.
The numbers of people listening would be well down though. The midnight quiz segment The Challenge on the late show started the other night with only three contestants; normally people from all over the country are fighting to get through to the switchboard.
The host (Lisa Forrest filling in for Tony Delroy) could only advise people to assume the show was on even if they couldn't hear it, and to try dialling in at the normal time. I guess this is a definition of faith: you can't hear it or see it, you just believe that it's there and act accordingly.
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