Here in Australia, we need some big holiday at the end of November that’s not as colonial as Thanksgiving, and not as blatantly commercial as the Black Friday sales. It would mean that the Christmas decorations at my local shopping mall would not have been put up before November 1st, and my local supermarkets would not have an entire section for puddings and pannetone from October. How can the festive season be special if it lasts for a whole one sixth of the year? I bumped into Santa on a mid-November Saturday at this shopping mall, surrounded by a throng of professional photographers. To everyone else’s credit, they mostly ignored him. Even the children, who might have done some staring and pointing, but didn’t get close.

It appears that it’s also conference season. I’ve had so many talks and webinars and other events to dial into over the last few weeks. They’re still happening online, which is great for being registered for more than one conference at a time, while still being able to get some of my normal work done. Of course I have that uncomfortable guilty feeling about cheating on conferences by channel-flicking between them. But I guess it’s to be expected that everything is happening right now.  Obviously, many things had to be postponed because of pandemic developments, but we’ve finally managed to get our vaccination rates up to a point where we can have a bit of breathing space. And yes, I am well aware that we are incredibly privileged to be able to do this. I’d also like to acknowledge the hard work of all my colleagues for getting us to this point.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than a month now since our restrictions have started to be lifted. And I must quite sheepishly say that in hindsight, I feel like that great aunt who catastrophises about everything. None of our fears about diseases from the big scary world outside ended up materialising. We didn’t see a massive resurgence of COVID-19 cases, and we also didn’t see influenza or measles make a triumphant return.

That first weekend after things started opening back up again, I tried to be super strategic with my plans. I tried to mark the moment by doing something that I wasn’t previously allowed to do, but I didn’t want to be among crowds of people out and about celebrating their new freedoms with careless abandon on a gloriously sunny spring day. 

And so I went to the Flour Shop. What a great first freedom to enjoy. I almost don’t want to tell everyone about this not-so-well hidden secret a couple of suburbs away from me (but in the next Local Government Area and therefore had been off-limits). The queues outside the shop on weekends are just the right length at the moment. They create a sense of anticipation without being painful. There’s almost this bond from shared knowledge between you and the other people in line. The, “Oh you must have seen this week’s menu on Instagram! Can’t wait to try that new creation!” So for those of you who don’t know about the place, it’s a little neighbourhood bakery that can only fit two customers inside at a time. They’re only open 4 days a week. The other 3 days are spent experimenting with new baked goods, often with a slight south Asian twist, with the new menu published just the night before reopening. All of their baked goods look home-made, though. There’s none of the perfectly round, mirror-glazed fancy-pantsiness. Their items have their own individuality … and are pretty substantial in size!

While I’m in the Turramurra area, where the Flour Shop is located, let me tell you a little bit more about this suburb. The name of the place is a direct nod to the traditional owners of the land, the Darramurragal people. As far as suburbs go, it’s one of the leafy residential suburbs around this part of Sydney. But it’s also home of one of the many spectacular sections of the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, the third oldest national park in Australia. It was created in 1894 after petitioning by Mr Du Faur, the guy who also owned much of the land in Turramurra (he was also the person who petitioned for Turramurra to be named after its traditional owners, back in the days when a petition signed by one person might still be powerful … if you had enough money, I suppose).

The park is pretty huge. A whole 150 square kilometres within the bounds of metropolitan Sydney. There are several entrances closer to my place, some of which I’ve explored. I’ve also been to some of the bits quite a lot further afield, many years ago, and never made the connection that it was all still the same national park until recently. And earlier this year, I went to the Bobbin Head part of the park, accessible from North Turramurra. The natural beauty of this place is much less of a secret than the Flour Shop. The name, though, is a little bit creepy. Apparently there’s a rock there somewhere that looks like somebody’s head bobbing up and down in Cowan Creek, the inlet that flows through this part of the park. I would have called it a fjord, but it’s actually a ria. Apparently the difference is that fjords are carved out by glaciers, but rias are formed by flooding of deep valleys. Maybe you already knew that, and you can roll your eyes at my public display of ignorance. If you didn’t know, you can thank me at a future trivia night. In the meantime, let me continue to pretend that I know something about geology by leaving you with photos of some scenic Hawkesbury sandstone.