Top weekend

We started the weekend with a visit to Wylie's baths on Friday afternoon to catch with our old mate Saska on her last afternoon in Sydney before flying back to London. Saska lived in Sydney for 10 years before heading home to England the year before last. Her leaving celebrations, dubbed the festival of Saska lasted some days and even made it into the paper. She was back in Sydney for her pre-40th birthday celebrations and the second festival of Saska was on again. We hosted a dinner and went to her 40th birthday dinner as part of the 3 week festival. our afternoon at Wylie's was quite the mother's meeting - us with Florence (Scarlett at nursery) Sue sans her son Wilf (also in nursery), Melissa with baby Lotus, Tracy pregnant with her first and Saska, being honorary bottle feeder of the Duthie offspring, keen as ever to give Flo her bottle. After an afternoon swimming in the ocean pool and basking in the sun, we headed round the corner to Barzura for champagne and rose before Saska had to leave. That night the Duthies headed out to dinner en masse. Florence slept in her pram throughout despite it being a very busy noisy restaurant, but then they sleep through anything at this age. Scarlett was a model diner, only drawing on the table cloth a bit and not throwing any of her pizza at the waiter. Saturday was a scorcher devoted to kicking a ball in the back garden, riding bikes, stocking up on food and heading to the pool. In the evening we packed up the pram and the esky and walked up the road to the local church where a brilliant jazz trio played among the gravestones. About 100 or so people gathered at sunset to listen with picnics and we dined on double smoked ham, pecorino, ciabatta, red wine and champagne, again while Flo slept throughout. It was quite magical. Then at 7.30pm we headed home in the dark to observe Earth Hour until 8.30pm where pretty much the whole city turned off its lights for an hour to bring attention to global warming. Even the harbour bridge and opera house had their spotlights turned off and most of the skyscrapers turned off unnecessary lights making a dramatic difference to the usual city skyline view at night. We lit candles and kept the telly off to do our bit too.