In Rod We Trust

Tonight is Wodonga's 'Carols By Candlelight' service down at nearby Willow Park.

Robyn is taking part and virtually the whole town will be there to watch. She is part of a three girl group and will be singing three songs on the main stage.

She was on local telly on Friday promoting the event. And yesterday they performed at the Mate Street Festival in Albury. It was great to see her perform in front of a crowd and to have her grand parents there too was nice. She sings a solo part during 'Silver Bells', something she would have never have had the confidence to do back home.

Last night me and the wife had our first night out together since our arrival in Australia. It was the Softball team's Xmas do and we had a good time. I'm struggling to get my head around the fact that it's the festive season- it just doesn't seem right in the warmth of an Aussie summer.

Joining the Softball team, as gay as it sounds, was a social master stroke, as they're a great mob, all around our age with a similar outlook on life as ourselves.

Last night we both noticed how the Aussies seem to be charmingly lacking in self-consciousness. We spent a good deal of the night observing them as they let their hair down. They dance like no-one's watching.

We caught the excellent courtesy bus home for the bargain price of $5 apiece and whilst travelling we witnessed another example of them not giving too much of a hoot.

This pretty young girl got on the bus, her appearance not dishevelled even after a nights partying. She looked about eighteen or nineteen, prime age for vanity. She sat on her own near the front and about ten minutes into the journey she reaches into her handbag and pulls out this massive chicken leg and starts munching on it. Due to it's 'doggy-bag' style of packaging it was obvious that she had liberated said leg from the buffet of the Xmas party she had been attending. She gets down to the bone in no time and then, very delicately, wipes her chops as if she's at the Captains Table and folds up all her rubbish and tucks it neatly away into her bag.

Nothing too remarkable, I suppose, and no-one on the bus so much as raised an eyelid but it struck both me and the wife how unlikely it would have been to have witnessed this in the UK. She probably wouldn't have travelled alone to start with and it's unlikely such a bus service would even be running at that time of the morning anyway. Thirdly, self-consciousness would have prevented her British counterpart from, not only, eating her snack until she was safely out of the sight of her peers, but also of taking it in the first place.

In other local news, Wodonga's superbly named Mayor, Rodney Wangman, has been re-elected to serve a second term.

Although Rod possesses the classic political 'smiling assassin' look I'm glad, purely on the basis of him having such a cool name.