The great beach search: a winner!

It’s almost the official end of summer, a seasonal designation the Country Mouse and I refuse to acknowledge, so much so that we are going north for Easter, anything to prolong our sun exposure. As a couple with sand in our souls we go screaming and kicking into winter.

But before this summer is wrapped there has been a big job to put to bed. For the past 18 months I have been conducting a beach search of the Hunter, knowing that I couldn’t settle into my new home until I had a short list of beaches to call my own and a secret wish to find that special one above all others.

Despite this sad La Nina summer the CM and I have remained upbeat, heading ocean ward whenever it was possible. In my quest we have travelled north to Nelson Bays’ beaches, with my sister swearing by Zenith Beach and the CM raving over an old favourite Berubi Point. We went south to Caves Beach and I oohhed and aahhed over its sea caves promising pirates and smuggled treasure.

Nearer to Newcastle we had a dramatic visit to Redhead, our planned beach walk coinciding with a shark attack on a local surfer. I was fascinated by the beach’s rust-coloured cliffs and one of its most identifiable features, the old wooden lifeguard tower – ironically also the shark lookout – perched on a rock shelf.

So I am going to take this (wet, unbeachy) Leap Day in this Leap Year to announce that the verdict is in and frankly I’m relieved. Although I’ve loved the chase it’s good to be settled, to find The One and breathe a salty sigh of relief.

With the summer sun setting behind the winner’s dais the sash has been handed to… Dudley Beach for its unspoiled beauty, its surfing doggies, undesignated nudity and its air of a remote, almost private, paradise. Which it is.

The Circle Game

As my life heads off on another circuitous path, I’m watching with intrigue those people who live lives of regularity, routine and order.

One of the Country Mouse’s musical companions eats dinner in the same place, at the same time every night. The CM raises his eyebrows at this, seeing it as a sign of his rigidity and I agree, but secretly I am fascinated. How did he create such a tidy, ordered world? I barely know where I will be eating my next meal; let alone what it will be.

My life has never followed a straight line, or a gently curving arc, not even the predictability of a zigzag. It’s been more like a series of crazy spirals which careered off at right angles; circled back on themselves and either crashed in a spectacular blaze or shot off into the sky as a series of multi-coloured fireworks.

Well one of those wild curve balls is has just been thrown my way (again).

After living at Dulwich Hill since late 1997 I’ve said goodbye to the Inner West. I cried that my next move wasn’t north to the Mouse House (as I had planned), but the consolation is the utter absurdity that, despite my precarious financial situation, I am now a denizen of the Eastern Suburbs. And not just anywhere in the East, but the suburb which in 2008 the Sydney Morning Herald deemed to be the city’s best and which beat the other 640 contenders - Bronte.

It was given the gong by the paper’s judges for its great beach, vibrant cafes, good primary school, proximity to the city and all-round ‘liveability’. Soon after a local real estate agent praised the SMH competition and Bronte’s win because “it put another zero on the end of the suburb’s property prices”.

I am now living with The Swimmers, and they are family no less. The glory of the nearby ocean and my new fitness regime involving the possibility of early morning or late afternoon swims (or both), beach walks and seaside yoga classes is insane. This morning as I sat on a headland before work drinking coffee and watching the Tamarama surfers I had to laugh – my life, is anyone else’s this mad?

A month ago I was doing the hideous housing rounds, a situation so grim and joyless that my only relief from the horror of it all was my mate Mark who lives in a matchbox apartment with walls so thin he can hear his neighbour relieving himself in the bathroom next door.

He recently did Saturday real estate hell, i.e. viewing properties to rent in Sydney, and he had me whooping out loud with his description of viewing an apartment so small, with a hallway so narrow, that he confronted the agent with “If I had an erection I couldn’t turn sideways in this place”.

Shortly afterward I read a report confirming that it is official, Australia, and specifically Sydney’s, housing is ‘severely unaffordable’, indeed, second only to Hong Kong in the severity of its unaffordability. This grim statistic gave me dark comfort in some black hours - it wasn’t just me facing a housing nightmare.

And then out of left field came Bronte; and I’m back from the edge. The next chapter of my life is looking like an epic firework and I’m spinning, Catherine Wheeling, heading for the stars.

The other side

What do you do when life is too difficult, when so much has been thrown at you that your resources are exhausted and the only way out is to see your misfortune as part of some greater (at least benign, hopefully meaningful) plan?

One of my strategies is to opt out and consult the other side, much to the Country Mouse’s incredulity. Yep, off I go to my clairvoyant, an angel-eyed English woman whose spookily accurate predictions have given me so much comfort since my first visit in late 2009 I make seeing her an annual present to myself.
At my first reading The Clairvoyant looked me straight in the eye, smiled broadly and said “a big love is coming your way”. Whoa! Three months later the Country Mouse, that Big Love, came crashing into my world. I was converted; so converted that I started converting others.

Last year it was the turn of the Culinary Goddess to get ‘psyched’. You might remember her from a post almost a year ago, she is the Good Samaritan who took me in when I needed it most, the circumstances of which were so traumatic I choose to forget them, and in whose Inner West home I roost during my Sydney working week.

On the Culinary Goddess’s last birthday she might have been anticipating a dinner out, or a movie, a book or a gift voucher – nooooooo – I knew what she really needed was The Clairvoyant. The CG had been on a cosmic see-saw of loss and love the previous 12 months and I’d watched sadly from the sidelines as she dealt with huge grief and cheered loudly when she was blessed with great love. The Clairvoyant came through for her delivering messages which were precise, emotionally confronting, but balanced. Her future was looking good.

I decided to piggy-back on her birthday reading and get an early annual one of my own; I needed a fix from the other side. My reading was full of Hunter hope, clear descriptions of the great job I was going to get and of the future happiness I was going to have. And the timeframe for all this was… summer. I left elated. Now in the final stretch of this pseudo summer my mood is as grey and wet as the skies. The job hasn’t eventuated. And I’m about to move sideways in Sydney instead of north to the Promised Land. Has The Clairvoyant lost her touch? I’m done for.