Quiet time. The madness of Chrissie having swept past yet again – and in the midst of whirlwind trip home – time to compile the annual List of Stuff I Still Miss From Australia. All of which form the basis of life’s absolute necessities downunder, and are readily available in every country on earth except of course western Europe, or any other place I happen to be at the time.

- plastic bags in supermarkets (curses on these eco-friendly Germans!)
- reasonably priced postage
- boomerang pillows
- tropical crush boost juices (how can you go wrong?)
- any given point on the Coogee to Bondi walk
- blessed English language telly
- the Aussie sense of humour - or, on occasion, any sense of humour. Once, early on in my time in Germany, I was sidelined by a shocking and quite gross bout of food poisoning. Having said to my German flatmate ‘I don’t think your country likes me’ – admittedly a poor attempt at a joke but the best I could come up with mid-vomit - he looked at me disapprovingly and said, ‘Countries cannot like, or dislike, Elezen. They are just countries.’
- wearing thongs all day, every day, every season, every ocassion. Enough said.
- Culinary classics like hot chips, meat pies, chicken pies, chicken and veggie pies, and other form of pie, sausage rolls, prawns at the beach, meatamytosis-inducing barbeques…
- Aussie dollars: not only is it depressing to see your life savings halved the minute you leave the country, it’s worse to then automatically double every price tag here…
- playing scattergories and pictionary with the folks (although this can be quite the stressful experience for visitors due to the level of cheating involved, both blatant and unobtrusive, its something I value highly as a creative outlet. Who else but my mum would try to claim 8 points for an historical figure starting with H with King Henrys I through VIII? Or interpret a piece of broccoli as the Pope standing behind a picket fence?