Freakin hell, when I think about it a bit, can you believe it's been damn near 10 years since we all had a decent meal together?

In the old days we'd get together and drink astonishingly expensive wine (and copius amounts of it) the meat would be expensive and it would have been slaved over for hours. Desert would be accompanied by a superb sticky (that always wrote me off for the night) and then coffee and invariably scotch. We arrive home by some means (normally the wimmin folk having driven us home) really late and happy.

Discussion would revolve around work, and buying houses, and bloody David Haines would always try and talk about English football (my eyes would glaze over and I'd go find the bottle to dull the pain). The guys would stand around the barbeque and talk shit, the woman clucked somewhere, their biological clocks clanging away in the background. It was all bloody fantastic.

What do we do these days? We all arrive early, 5:30 or the like, and make 15 trips between the house and the car, ferrying in all the crap kids need to survive. One of us is either pregnant or still breast feeding the latest addition so can't drink with the rest of us. The noise is deafening as the kids proceed to tear the unfortunate sod whose turn it is to host us house to bits. We all collapse around the dinner table drinking cheap wine because thats all we can afford on all our single incomes. Dinner is something very easy to prepare and cook. The Peacocks have long ago stopped calling us 8 minutes before they were due to arrive with some cockamamy story about one of the sickly offspring is sick or whatever. Dinner is scoffed as fast as possible, and then we are all gone by 8:15pm.

The photo is of some stairs up the side of the fuel tank down at the wharf. I went for a walk around the harbor to get some photo's, but 15 minutes after I arrived the sun went behind the cloud and buggered the light.