Punishable by Death

I'm a changed man since moving to Oz. You may remember the old James, who very much adopted a live-and-let-live policy to insects. In fact, I even felt twinges of guilt when I considered taking the life of an innocent spider. I would much rather have chased them out of the house or let them be - neither option was quite good enough for my arachnophobia wife. Since arriving here I've lost all compassion for the
insect race. I now maim, slice and dice with the best of them. The insects in Australia are a different, mutant breed compared to our peace-loving UK versions. As
far as I'm concerned, a spider forfeits its right to life that moment that it grows as big as a man's face. Now you'll see me chasing a beast around the house with murderous intent. Is it in our shoe cupboard (where it's clearly been trying on our footwear)? Is it hiding behind an ornament? Who cares? It's a dead spider walking.

I've decided not to print any further photos of my fingernail. It's not looking great at the moment but soon it will be healed totally. Consider this matter closed. CLOSED, I said.


Back to an Englishman's favourite topic - the weather. We're in summer here so we've got appropriately summerish weather. There's also been plenty of rain so you could say we're having something of an English summer. Dubbo's December record for rainfall has, apparently, already been broken so everyone is pretty happy at the moment. It's working out very nicely too. We generally have very warm days (or days that are a bit too warm) and then some cracking thunderstorms in the evening / night. They're torrential. I've seen the most amazing lightning storms in my life over the past few weeks.


It's also Christmas soon. You may have noticed. It's weird here because it feels all wrong to be so hot. We've done a bit of decorating (that's one of those 'we's that refers to everyone in the family except me) and so on. Our Christmas tree is pretty small and we've loaded it with candy canes, which is something of a risk when you have small candy cane thieves moving around the house unsupervised. Still - none of our children would even be able to get away with such a crime, would they? Would they?


As a little bonus 'something to do this week' here's a photo. See if you can identify which of our three children it shows. It should take you about 0.005 of a second to figure it out. Just call me The Riddler. Answer next week.