After three months absence,  I’m told that club members are wondering how things are with me and whether I am troubled by the catastrophic Australian bush fires. The Bowling Abroad blog seems to be the best way to report back.

I am leasing a small apartment on the eighth floor of a 10-storey building in Manly, a suburb of Sydney. The Pacific Ocean view from my front window towards Shelly Beach is spectacular, as you can see. I am a long way from the worst of the fires, but the whole city of Sydney has been plagued by smoke for weeks. If I took the same picture today it would be a lot more hazy.

When I first got here, sulphur-crested cockatoos came regularly to my balcony. The previous occupant must have fed them. Now they rarely alight, although they are always in the vicinity, announcing their presence with raucous calls. However, the other day, one appeared right at the threshhold of my open balcony door and gave a polite squawk to attract my attention away from the newspaper I was reading. Irresistible! I really shouldn’t feed them but gave it a small piece of apple, which was held in one claw and eaten daintily. 

My son Jon and his family live about 15 minutes’ walk away on Manly Hill. My daughter Catherine lives in Mosman, about 20 minutes by car. I see them all quite often, although they are either at work or in school five days a week, unlike my previous visits where I always arrived at the beginning of the school holidays to get two weeks with the children.

Manly is a community of 16,000 people (slightly fewer than Oak Bay) at the southern end of the Northern Beaches, a series of beach side communities that stretch from Manly, close to the mouth of Sydney Harbour up to Barrenjoey Head. Some people can even afford to buy their homes here at a median price A $2.8 million for a house, around twice that of Oak Bay. I checked out a seaside 1900 square foot, three‑bedroom apartment the other day, which I quite fancied for my southern summer residence, but when I heard someone ask the agent about the price and found out it was A$6.6 million, I thought I had better leave before I fell in love with it. It sold three days later. House prices do not seem to stop young people from living here, though. Average age in Manly is 36, compared to Oak Bay’s 53.6 years.  (Sorry about all the statistics behind these links, but I am with Lord Kelvin who once said, “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it. When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; . ..”  Perhaps not always true; I know the exact price of the apartment, but still find that knowledge “unsatisfactory”. I digress – as usual.)

Manly is “Seven miles from Sydney and 1000 miles from care” to quote the sign that greets you when you disembark from the ferry that left Sydney’s Circular Quay, near the famous Harbour Bridge, some 30 minutes before. Many city types live in Manly because it is typically a short walk to the ferry dock for the scenic and relaxing harbour trip to and from work ‑ sometimes more frightening than relaxing in winter, when giant waves from the Pacific roll through the Heads and catch the ferries broadside.

Have to mention the bowling, since this the Bowling Abroad blog. The view from my bedroom in the opposite direction from the ocean shows the two greens of the Manly Lawn Bowling Club, just five minutes walk away on the far side of the cricket pitch, so I am well set. I have joined the club, but more about bowling in the next blog entry. This first report is just to set the scene.

They say “Australia is a beach”. There are more than 10,000 of them stretching along 50,000 kilometres of coastline. Here are my five local ones in Manly, all within a few minutes walk. I have added a sixth, the beach of my boyhood, where a summer day was wasted if I wasn’t on the beach.