Things have become very busy recently and there’s no one to blame but myself as I thrash about trying to find some meaning in a new life in Australia.

Kerry is very busy too, but she’s studying and by the end of the year she’s going to come away with some qualifications that will be important in the future.  Her study has meaning, an end point and an obvious benefit.

I’m a little bit different as I try to squeeze in time for lawn bowls, camera club, yoga and a bit of exercise at the local gym.  Then there is the big task that I’m working on, which sorting out five years of poorly catalogued and labelled art/photos. It’s always been a hobby to me but If I want to have any hope of promoting and selling my work, I actually have to find images amongst hundreds of gigabytes of files.

This task has been rewarding and intensely tedious.

I’ve never known what I wanted to do with my life, and at fifty-one, nothing has changed. But as I pick up new hobbies I enjoy and build a new life it’s no surprise it’s taken a while to find my feet.  It’s not like I walked back into my old life in Australia.  I left home at twenty-three and the most important things to me at the time were my mates, Saturday night at the pub and the Lorne football club.

It’s fair to say that my priorities changed over the last couple of decades.

I’m also getting a potential skin cancer cut out next week.  That’s not that bad but I had a confirmed cancer cut out of my leg last month and I’m now on very friendly terms with my GP.  The operation next week is more precautionary because I went in for an all over skin check last week. He told me there was nothing worrying but he was suspicious of a black mole on my back.

I have a history stretching back to 2012 with melanoma (the most aggressive form of skin cancer) and I have no desire to develop another one so I asked him if he felt it would develop into a cancer in time.  Yes, he said.  And if it does develop it will be a melanoma?  Yes, he said.  Can we just cut it out now then?  Yes, he said.

I’m going under the knife for a second time in a month.

Next month, Kerry and I are going on a little road trip with my dad to Longreach, in central Queensland.  It’s the home of Qantas and it’s on his bucket list.  It’s also a fifty-hour return journey.  In the UK, that’s a long way but here no one seems to be bothered by the length of the drive.  All my workmates told me it’ll be a great drive and a good bit of fun.  I used to think the nine hour journey to Cornwall was too far, so we’ll find out.

Hopefully the next instalment of this blog will be full of photos from our road trip.