G Garb returns to Earth - sigh...

Thelma and I parted company in Sydney – temporarily, mind you – after our epic UK journey. Our day jobs and real lives awaited. Erk.

Not to mention jet-lag. Omigod, how insidious is it? It took me nearly a week of falling asleep at odd times, and forcing myself to stay awake at others (an unheard of experience for this insomniac!) AND going to work at my usual hour every day. No wonder my poor blog has been neglected.

Thelma has a slightly more flexible working arrangement, and keeps more civilised hours, but she suffered as well. I rang her occasionally and got babble - something that sounded like a weird combo of sleep-talking, hysteria and Atlantean (or something!). Jet-lag really does suck. However, seeing as we are now sophisticated international jet-setting women of mystery and intrigue, I will stop whingeing about jet-lag, and will pretend that in our sophisticatedness we didn't even notice it!

I will also not mention the terrible toll the trip took on our, um, bowel habits, or the outrageous profits that laxative companies have made in Canberra alone since my return! When they talk about your body being disrupted by travel, they're not kidding!

But apart from the weird sleep and odd-innards – we're home sweet home now. Reflecting on the trip, I have to say it was a fabulously once-in-a-lifetime thing – what memories! What photos! What hangovers!

Thelma and I have had to pick up our lives in Greta (Thelma) and Canberra (Betty), and our business planning now takes place over the phone, rather than within the luxurious confines of Claridge's! (oh, what a bloody hard THUD back to reality that is!)

For the time being I'm returning you to your regular programming, and the Occasional Adventures of Betty is once again primarily my Betty blog – but changed forever (as Thelma and Betty are) because G Garb has become such a fabulously challenging part of my life now as well (thank you Thelma!). G Garb fans - don't abandon me now, because until the G Garb site is fully functional, I'm happily sharing my blog with G Garb.

What a mega-adventure the UK was, and now we are firmly finding our footing back on Planet Earth, and focussing on selling some sophisticated cool G Garb hats!

The fab new G Garb website is under construction. This weekend will be a busy one as Thelma and Betty get together with our lovely web-guru to look at ways to make the G Garb website exciting, edgy and user-friendly. Watch this space...

Right now, though, I'm off to blog about a wonderful weekend in Tasmania!

Havoc at Heathrow - G Garb Goes Home

The thing is, when you're going to spend one night at Claridge's, you want to make the most of the experience. We had intended staying awake all night, so as not to miss a minute of it, but by midnight, this old chook was all done in – and decided that sleeping in the lovely, monstrous Claridge's bed was an integral part of the Claridge's experience. I took my champagne-soaked brain and exhausted bones to bed, and was quite correct - it was divine!

Thelma lasted a few hours longer.

Of course, there is a direct correlation between tiredness levels and brain deadness levels. Hold that thought.

A massive repack of suitcases for the journey home was in order before our car arrived and we were once again whisked through the revolving door into the morning chaos of London – in the nicest possible way.

Our driver was a cheery sort who got us to Heathrow in plenty of time, and that was when the 'fun' began.

Remember that tiredness/brain deadness correlation? It's the only explanation I have for the 'Oops' moments that followed. We checked in our baggage at the Qantas counter, and just before Thelma's was trundled away she realised she needed to retrieve it to do yet another repack. It was kind of funny in a cheek-burning way, as she burrowed through piles of dirty laundry and carry-on luggage right there at the check-in counter to remove bottles of perfume, cosmetics, deodorant etc – in other words, lots of LAGs stuff – from her carry-on luggage, and transferred it all to the giant suitcase.

I hopped from foot to foot and looked apologetic as the check-in queue grew longer behind us, and finally the giant suitcase – now even heavier – was checked in again. We shuffled away to the next disaster – security screening.

At Heathrow you practically have to unpack your carry-on luggage and undress, to get through screening. How embarrassment. Off came the stinky shoes, the hat, the jacket. Out of the bag came the laptop and the smug little LAGs bag. I chucked my shoulder bag into the box as well, and walked through the scanner to collect my stuff.

Getting dressed again on the other side, I realised my shoulder bag hadn't reappeared. Shit – my wallet! My Camera! My fab mobile phone! I dashed to the screening counter to ask for it, just as a stern-faced screener lady appeared with my bag in hand. My relief suddenly turned to horror as she said “Right, let's have a look in here then, shall we?”

How embarrassment again! “Ah, this is the problem'” she said, pulling the can of Red Bull from the depths of the shoulder bag where I had totally forgotten it. I said a bad word and she laughed.

“Do you want to drink it before I take it away?” she said, so I gratefully guzzled it in about 5 seconds flat (thereby proving I was not trying to smuggle liquid explosives on board) and said something stupid about the much-needed boost to my caffeine levels, while she went through my bag carefully, swabbing my camera and phone for traces of explosives, seeing as I had already shown myself up as a complete idiot who couldn't be trusted to get on a plane properly.

I hope my boss never reads this...

At last, we were allowed to skulk off, red-faced, in search of coffee (which I no longer actually needed after the massive Red Bull hit). Great start to the day.

It was a relief to get on the plane without further embarrassment, and take off at about midday, Thursday (London time).

What can I say about the flight home? It was long and tiring and they made us get off in Singapore, and then be screened again. Aaaaargh! The plane was full of red-headed babies who screamed a lot, and small children who talked a lot. Thank goodness for sleeping pills and in-flight movies.

The new Star Trek is brilliant, and Mary & Max made me laugh and cry, and it was a huge relief to get off the plane in Sydney at something like 7.30pm, Friday (Sydney time). Home sweet home. Well, almost. Thelma's and my respective homes were still a couple of hundred kilometres away, so we spent the night in Sydney – and managed to sleep until 4am.

I'm wondering when I will get my brain back – it appears to have been lost in transit.

Seriously Glam - G Garb goes to Claridge's

Omigod, Thelma and I felt like we were on a Monopoly board on Wednesday! We caught a National Express coach from Cambridge to Victoria Coach Station in London, before hopping into a real London taxi (one of those beautiful old-fashioned looking black ones), which whisked us to our HUGE Thelma & Louise girly road trip Big Bang finish – a night at Claridge's (so much more civilised than driving off a cliff, don't you think?)

When the heck did London (remember, I was born here!) get to be so huge and frantic and claustrophobic? The traffic was seriously mental, and my heart was in my mouth for much of the trip. But OH! The names of the places! Remember how I raved about the Egyptian exhibits at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge? Well, there was the same sense of being Somewhere Very Special that we had Almost Always Known as we drove through the madness that is London! Bow, Stepney, Blackfriars, Fenchurch St Station, Temple Bar – the names are all so familiar – and of course, Park Lane and then, the pinnacle of pinnacles – Mayfair – and not just Mayfair, but Claridge's! (can you hear me screaming?)

Claridge's was an oasis of calm. I wish I could find the words to describe the transition from traffic chaos to sea of serenity. It began when the taxi pulled up outside this hallowed institution. The seamlessly smooth extraction of our harrowed selves from the taxi was so quick and painless that it was almost invisible – but I have a recollection of delightfully polite men in top hats.

Through the revolving door - “It's about three steps, then turn to your left, Madam” - and Thelma and Betty were transported to a beautifully serene and genteel world, far from the madding crowd – and it was amazing. They must have some sort of sound-absorbent wallpaper or something, because the hush in the foyer, despite all the marble, is so striking!

I'm finding it difficult to describe it – it was truly overwhelming. The surrounds were so beautiful, from the splendour of the foyer and the wide wide corridors (so designed so that Victorian Ladies could comfortably pass one another in their voluminous dresses!) to the art-deco splendour of the suite in which we stayed. I think it was the attention to detail that just blew us away – the handwritten note to Thelma, welcoming us to Claridge's, the brief tour by the lovely young Frenchman from Reception; the niceness of the man who operates the lift, who wished us a pleasant stay (and then this morning asked if we had remembered to have our passports handy – more about that in tomorrow's post!)

In the relaxing atmosphere of our suite we worked diligently on The Business Plan as we sipped our complimentary French champagne. Oh what a hard life!

Our silver service room service dinner was a mouthwatering delight. I don't think I will ever be able to eat chicken again without comparing it (unfavourably!) to that unbelievably tender, juicy, falling-off-the-bone bird... (Thelma had concerns – was it a happy free range chicken before it was brought to our table? I think it was. It was too tender to have been stressed!)

And when it comes to getting a good night's sleep in noisy London I can't find enough superlatives to describe the beds and pillows - absolute Cloud Nine material. There's a story going around that a certain king once brought his own bed to Claridge's, but couldn't sleep – so he tried one of the Claridge's beds and ended up buying 30 of them to take home with him. I can understand that.

The whole Claridge's experience was truly magnificent. It made me think about people who go there regularly, as a matter of course (I believe we stayed in the suite that Brad and Angelina stayed in) – and I wonder how hard it would be to stay in touch with the Real World if you got used to the exceptionally superb Claridge's 'star' treatment that is the way they treat every guest... watch this space – we'll let you know.

The final fabulosity – getting to Heathrow for our flight home...

Thelma's luggage has somehow transmogrified into a two-tonne monster (ok, a slight exaggeration, but not something you want to be dragging around behind you on public transport in any case, and we were dreading the concept of lugging it up gutter and down staircase.) Those lovely people at Claridge's organised for a beautiful S-Class Mercedes, complete with driver, to take us to the airport. Watch this space for news of the ride!

Cambridge - the Charles Darwin exhibition

A hop, skip and a jump from our 'home' at the Royal Cambridge Hotel is the Fitzwilliam Museum, which was a favourite haunt of Charles Darwin (yes, that Charles Darwin) in his university days (it seems rather a lot of famous people went to the University of Cambridge!). At the moment the Fitzwilliam is hosting an exhibition about the interaction between science and art, with a focus on the work of Darwin.

Thelma was in seventh heaven – she has been a Darwin groupie for years. What a wonderful exhibition! It's open until October this year, if you're in the area.

There's a lot more to the Fitzwilliam than the Darwin exhibition though. We took a little walk through some of the other galleries – it goes on forever and ever – and we simply didn't do it justice. After looking at ceramics from the Near and Far east, I dragged Thelma to the Ancient Egypt gallery (so exciting!) to check out the sarcophagi and the hieroglyphics.

When I was about 12 my Dad gave me a book about Egyptian Art – full of colour plates of fabulous Egyptian artefacts – and at the Fitzwilliam I kept dragging the long-suffering Thelma from one case to another and practically squealing: “Look, that was in my book! Wow, and that one too! Oooh, look!” It was so weird – things I had been looking at on paper for over 30 years were suddenly right in front of us. Freaky!

Here's a pic of the great stairs leading up to the art galleries and down to the antiquities areas. Wow. I'm still buzzing because I saw a real live Modigliani, a couple of Picassos, a Fra Filippo Lippi, a Sir Joshua Reynolds - more of the same "omigod, this is the Real Deal" feeling...

After that, we hit the shops. I kept watch over Thelma's green bag full of hats while she tried on (and bought) half of Cambridge's fashion offerings. She is a perfect clothes-horse – slim and willowy – and the new season's gear – long dress-like tops with footless tights – looks fabulous on her.

I didn't bother trying on the clothes – they're not the sorts of things I can wear on the bike (which I find myself thinking of rather a lot at the moment...) I did, however, find a Basil Fawlty t-shirt that I simply had to have...

...a shop with my name on it...

...and a funny sign, in amongst all the antiquity...

Our time in Cambridge has been all too brief – there's still so much to see – but Claridge's awaits! Come Wednesday morning we will say goodbye to Cambridge and head to London. Wheeeeeeee!

G Garb goes to Cambridge

What a day! We packed our hats and said goodbye to the lovely Bedford Lodge Hotel in Newmarket, and came all the way to Cambridge – a grand total of about 50kms, but a world away from the bucolic splendour of Horsey Central!

No horses here – the traffic is constant, and I've never seen so many bicycles in my entire life! Oh, but it is just so pretty!
We're staying at the Royal Cambridge Hotel, which is in the middle of the city, and only a brisk walk away from the great colleges of Cambridge University. We seemed to snaffle the last available room in the entire city – there are some conferences happening at the moment, and everywhere is booked out, which is why we are perched like eagles high above the Ring Road.
Our room is the one at the end - on the top floor - the one with the window wide open, to let in the ambience, ha ha!

What an amazing city! 2009 is Cambridge University's 800th anniversary year – that sort of continuity is hard to imagine. In Australia we get excited by anything that predates 1900, so we were almost hysterical over the medieval bits of the city.

A two-hour walking tour included a stickybeak inside Kings College Chapel. I've been a fan of choral music since my uni days, and the choir of Kings College has always been my favourite, so I was a bit overwhelmed – teary, almost – to actually be there under the massive fan-vaulted ceiling.
Thelma took fourteen million photos of everything in sight (and especially photos of us looking scholarly at Corpus Christi College, Kings College, Trinity College etc etc etc), and then we went punting on the River Cam and took fourteen million more, while our lovely punt 'chauffeur', Giles, pointed out all sorts of interesting sights.
One of the first ports of call on our walking tour had been The Eagle – a lovely old pub which had been the 'local' for some of the greatest scientific minds of our time, from the nearby Cavendish Laboratory – so we went there for dinner. Also dining at The Eagle were a Kiwi mother and son. Hailing from Wellington, Reed is a graduate student at Trinity College, and he was having a farewell dinner with his mum when we persuaded him to wear the Hat of the Day.

Simply Red - Simply Super!

Before I say another word I have to say this – Kevin J Robinson, from Simply Red, has marvellous taste in hats. I know this because at last night's Newmarket gig he was wearing the same hat that I was – which just happens to be today's Hat of the Day. What a coincidence!

But more about that later. What a day it was! England thawed in yesterday's perfect summer weather – I spent part of the morning watching the busy Friday traffic stop for the horses on Bury Road in Newmarket.

Newmarket takes its equine activities very seriously. The horses even have their own footpath! People walk on the outer footpath, right next to the road, while the horses have a parallel inner footpath, safe and sound behind their human shield. I've never seen anything like it. Everywhere you look you see magnificent thoroughbreds strutting, and the half of the population that doesn't have hooves wears riding boots. On a sunny day, with the eye-stabbing green of the parkland and the pale blue of the sky, it's like a Constable painting – so very English...

Thelma and I got glammed up nice and early. My fabulously bling top from Vintage Angel needed a fabulous black hat to set it off, so I chose G Garb 9 instead of my usual, and Thelma bullied me into wearing some disgustingly high heels. I spent the evening extracting the stilettos from the soft ground of the racetrack and moaning about my aching feet. I am never wearing high heels again, no matter what!

Interest in our hats was high (coz of course we looked like glamorous sophisticated international jetsetters, tee hee - it had nothing to do with the fact that we kept telling anybody who would listen that 'Kevin Robinson wears G Garb hats!') and Thelma handed out quite a few business cards.

British reserve went out the window at the gig and we made some new friends. Like Simply Red uber-fans Jamie and Alison. Alison was kind enough to don the Hat of the Day while she and Jamie smiled for the camera.

And Linda (left) and Glen, who kept hoping Mick Hucknell would wander by and sweep them off their feet.

And some friendly bobbies, because of course, being us, we got lost looking for a taxi after the gig, and when I was little I was always told that if I was lost I should Ask a Policeman.

And then there was a lovely group of Poms who wanted to know where we hailed from (apparently we have accents. Figure that out – we thought it was them with the accents!) Seeing as I was born in Pommyland, we have called this photo Poms R Us.

Our taxi driver to and from the concert, coincidentally, was Jason, the husband of our Vintage Angel, Berni... and he ensured we got back to the Bedford Lodge safe and sound after an amazing evening. (Thanks heaps Jason!)

But the highlight of the night was undoubtedly the Simply Red concert, and actually getting to meet the band afterwards. Mick Hucknell graciously autographed a photo that my next door neighbour, Maree, took at the Canberra gig earlier this year, and posed for a photo with Thelma.

Kevin, the man with the hat, was kind and funny and interesting - and he shouted Thelma and I to a drink, so he's our latest hero – oh, and did I mention he has great taste in hats?

Signs of Life in the UK

I made the observation yesterday that the Brits seem to have perfected the art of not making eye contact. Just to annoy them, I've made a point of smiling at everybody (even those who look like axe-murderers) and saying hello, and mostly, people have been looking the other way – apart from a Muslim couple, an Asian lady and a probable axe-murderer (and two other notable exceptions – Glen and Berni – I'll tell you all about them later). I will continue my relentless campaign of friendliness if it kills me!

Thelma has caught a sniffle – no doubt from those germy people on the plane, who coughed and sneezed their pestilence into the fake air of QF1 all the way from Sydney to London. I went shopping for some medicinal red wine yesterday, and ended up having an adventure!

But first - I found some fabulous signs around the place that I want to share:

This one – telling it like it is – I love it!

And in the supermarket – Jerk marinade - for the Jerk in everybody's life!

I was overwhelmed by the abundance and variety of supermarket trolleys:

And the irony of this appealed to my warped sense of humour – the British Racing School is near the village of Snailwell.

So anyway, coming back from the supermarket I managed to get lost – and very nearly ended up in Snailwell! What an adventure – when I realised the road I was on was not getting any closer to the road I had hoped it would turn onto, I knocked on the door of a house at the front of the British Racing School. The door was opened by a nice young man.

'Hello', I said. 'I'm a stupid tourist, and I think I've got myself lost. I managed to get all the way from Australia to here, but I got lost on the way home from the bloody supermarket!'

The nice young man, whose name was Glen, is a teacher at the British Racing School, and he very kindly drove me back to the Bedford Lodge – what a knight in shining armour!

Today, Thelma and I went back to visit our new best friend, Berni. We met Berni yesterday when we wandered into her fabulous shop, Vintage Angel, in Newmarket. I bought a splendidly blingy top (which will feature in tomorrow's blog post) and Thelma bought a little figure-hugging dress (perfect for her, as she has a little figure).

We visited Berni today to tell her about our latest adventures and to take a photo:

And she gave me this lovely lovely card (made by her) and gave Thelma a Goddess Card reading to help heal her broken heart.
So there you are. Clearly, it's only some Brits who have perfected the art of not making eye contact – people like Glen and Berni are British treasures!

OH - before I forget - here's today's HOTD (Hat of the Day) - modelled by Miz Thelma, it's known simply as G Garb 4.

Blighty or Bust!

We made it! There were moments when that looked doubtful – Thelma's gargoyle eye, my froot-loopness and then the vicissitudes of powered flight.

We overcame the first two only to come very nearly unstuck with the third. Our Qantas flight was delayed for 2 hours while the engineers performed emergency surgery on the brakes (brakes being relatively important on an aeroplane, of course.)

Here's a pic of me waiting at the airport. Thank goodness there was a G&T handy!

So – my travelling day, which began at 7.20am, when Boomerang Boy drove me to the bus station for the 3 and a bit hour trip to the Sydney airport, suddenly became 2 hours longer.

And so did Thelma's. She and her gargoyle eye hopped into a taxi in Sydney at around 1pm.

The gargoyle eye was looking remarkably good – a little bleary, but that's all. After 24 hours on a plane, the other eye matched it anyway. As did mine.

Powered flight is so unnatural. So is sitting in a tiny seat surrounded by other similarly squashed people who don't bother covering their mouths when they cough. You feel a bit vulnerable. Sleeping pills gave me a grand total of two hours sleep and one hour of doze. No wonder the first 24 hours in England have been a total blur.

A blur which began on Tuesday when, a pair of gargoyles, we staggered from the plane at Heathrow at about 8.30am, and finally finally found a bus to Newmarket that deposited us in the main street at 1.30 pm. For me, a grand total of about 37 hours of combined travelling/waiting around/not sleeping or doing anything actually productive.

Here's Thelma, absolutely delirious with excitement and jet-lag. We made it!

When we arrived, we noticed an interesting phenomenon. The people who are paid to help you often don't. At Heathrow, the only person who was vaguely helpful was one of the West Indian rail workers. There was no useful signage and nobody would admit to knowing anything that might've helped us actually get out of the airport. If it hadn't been for that nice man we would still be wandering around Heathrow two days later.

But – we're here! (as you can see!) Here in the lovely Bedford Lodge Hotel (pictured at top), in lovely lovely Newmarket.

Travels and Travails - 2 days to go!

In my last post I alluded to a problem that Thelma has had with one of her eyes. Here's the goss...

Fate can be a bit of a meanie sometimes. In the last week she has seen fit to visit an eyeball condition upon Thelma. This eyeball condition involves a swelling inside the eyelid and blurred vision in that eye.

What’s a girl to do, less than a week before becoming a sophisticated international jetsetter?

This was the scene, three days ago:

Thelma stares fuzzily at the prospect of travelling to England looking like a Cyclops. Betty tries to be helpful.

'Does G Garb do a line in pirate hats? You could wear an eye- patch. That would look a bit swashbuckling and sophisticated.'

Thelma’s lumpy stare is frosty. 'No pirate hats, no eye-patches', she hisses. 'I’m not meeting Simply Red looking like Johnny Depp with boobs!'

Betty thinks Johnny Depp is a bit of a dish, with or without boobs. 'You know, if you wore a puffy shirt you’d hide the boobs.'

A pulse throbs in Thelma’s neck. 'I want my eyeball to be fixed,' she says slowly. 'I don’t want a pirate hat, an eye-patch, a puffy shirt, a white stick or a bloody seeing eye dog (although I am rather partial to dogs).'

She’s right, you know. Sophisticated international jetsetters shouldn’t have to contend with lumpy eyeballs.

A problem is a problem, of course, and this one wasn't going away. So. Yesterday Thelma took her eyeball to a surgeon, who performed some sort of magic inside the eyelid, involving a bit of cutting and scraping (eeeewwww!) I am reliably informed that today Thelma resembles a gargoyle (only on one side, of course). On the plus side, apparently she has an eagle eye - two of them, in fact, (when they're both working). Which they will be, by Monday. Honest.

This is turning into an interesting week, and omigod, I still haven't packed my bag!

'In' words for today

Thelma & I are about to become international jet-setters, tee hee! In less than a week we will board that flight and head to Blighty. For someone who, only a month ago, said to Thelma “Go to England? No, no I can't possibly. That would mean getting on a plane. You know I don't fly”, I'm remarkably calm.

OK, that's not true – I think I'm mistaking inertia for calm. It's more a sort of 'rabbit in the headlights' frozen-ness. So much to do, so little time. I never did find that orange something to wear that I was after on the weekend. This year's version of 'orange' is a sickly salmon pink that makes me look ill.

Omigod, and my to-do list keeps growing.

Yesterday I ticked off two items:
*** Organise international roaming for my phone
*** Buy some English money (and at 47 pence to the Aussie dollar I didn't get much bang for my buck!)

But those achievements were cancelled out by:
*** Book flights to France – so confusing! I gave up. Try again Tuesday.
*** Organise a plumber – Half an inch of cold water on my bathroom floor almost sent me and my fluffy slippers arse over tit at 6am yesterday. There's probably a more jet-setterish term than that to describe the desperate scrabble to keep my footing, but I don't know what it is.

Slithering about on wet tiles and emptying the vanity unit (do I really need 17 half-full bottles of shampoo and 5 litres of contact lens cleaner?) to try and determine the cause of the problem got me nowhere, and then of course there was the load of sopping wet towels that had to be washed afterwards. At least the bathroom floor is sparkly clean now. I turned off the whatchamacallit for the cold tap over the basin and went to work. When in doubt, walk away.

Dammit, sophisticated international travellers shouldn't have to contend with leaky taps!

It's now 6 days till we depart on the Big Adventure. My insomnia has reached monumental proportions. I've been awake since 2.30. I was eating crumpets with Vegemite at 4.30 this morning. Well, actually not REAL Vegemite – it was that new blend that they haven't named yet – in my heart of hearts I call it Yukkymite, because it's just, well, yukky. I bought a whole jar of the stuff, though, so I feel obliged to finish it, otherwise it may well end up joining the half-empty shampoo bottles in the Cupboard of Despair.

Ah, there goes the kettle – time for an injection of caffeine, or I shall never make it through another work day. I'm wearing an eye-stabbingly yellow jumper and striped hangover socks (so named because no-one with a hangover could look at them without throwing up) to help keep myself awake.

I keep telling myself that this time next week we shall be in the air somewhere between here and London, and all of this will seem insignificant, right? Right?

Thelma & Betty and the Perils of Packing

Crikey - it's not that easy! At least our hats are ready to go!


In the meantime.... Thelma is still practising walking in heels, and has just bought a suitcase.

The woman in the shop tried to sell her one big enough for the two of us and our gear to travel in; something you really wouldn't want to be lugging around everywhere, on and off trains etc. These days you can't actually leave your luggage anywhere unattended, or they call in the bomb people. A giant suitcase would be a bit of an albatross.

Betty: It's your turn to mind the suitcase!
Thelma: No, I minded it last time, remember, when you went to the loo, and you were gone for ages!

(This in itself would be a dreadful thing, as women are renowned for going to the loo in pairs. The existence of a giant suitcase would render this time-honoured tradition impossible to uphold.)

So - a sensible suitcase has been bought, in a becoming shade of simply red. Now, what to put in it? The rule of thumb is that if you don't want to be carrying it on and off trains and up and down escalators for a fortnight, leave it behind.

And then there's the carry-on luggage. Being the sophisticated international travellers that we are pretending to be, we don't want to arrive in England looking as if we've been pulled through a hedge backwards - but dear me it's hard to look fabulous after 24 hours in a flying sardine can filled with fake air. Our emergency skin care, toothpaste, deodorant, cosmetics and the biggie - hand sanitiser - have to be squished into tiny tiny bottles (of no greater than 100ml capacity) and sealed in a plastic bag no bigger than 20 x 20cm so that the screeners at the airport can see that we're not trying to bring explosives on board, cunningly concealed in, say, a 125ml bottle of emu oil (my favourite moisturiser).

Lucky me, though - my lovely friend Anna gave me a collection of LAGs*-legal skin care as part of my birthday pressie last week! Here's how it won't look once I've chucked it all into my sealable plastic LAGs* bag:



Today I am shopping for something orange. Not sure what - but my entire travel wardrobe at the moment is black or olive green, and I want something bright!

*LAGs - Liquids, aerosols and gels.

OMG - G garb?

G garb is the brainchild of Tracey Clark (aka Thelma), a biz whiz from the little town of Greta (the G in G garb) in the beautiful Hunter Valley, NSW, Australia. Everybody else in the Hunter Valley seems to do wine, so Tracey decided to do hats. Very logical choice.

She researched the market, wrote the business plan, sourced the hats, designed the logo and funded the setup of the company. Coming from a long career in sales, Tracey knows what’s what, and she’s great fun to boot. With a wicked sense of humour, an adventurous spirit and a steely determination to succeed, Tracey Clark has the qualities that will put G garb on the map.

But who is Tracey Clark? One of five children, she’s now a 46 year-old mother of two grown-up kids. She has three dogs – none of which is hers, is a solid gold dancer extraordinaire, an absolute non master of the violin and piano, and has written more poetry than Keats. She doesn’t like peeling potatoes, and once got lost for several days trying to put on a doona cover, so she doesn’t like them either. Apart from all that, she’s also stylish, effortlessly classy and has impeccable taste. But she’s not much of a traveller.

Tracey doesn’t travel, she moves. The last time was to New York, back in the 90s, and she spent 5 years living and working there before coming home to Oz. The trip to the UK will be her first proper ‘tour’.

That’s where I (Betty) come in. I have been overseas at least 3 times, not even counting the fact that I was born there, and not counting New Zealand either, because that’s almost Australia anyway. I am a whiz at looking lost and asking for directions in two and a bit languages, and I’m the Sensible One.

Tracey/Thelma will try to tell you otherwise, but all you need to do is read some of my other posts to know it’s true. I ride around the countryside and fall off motorbikes in my spare time. And I’m Tracey’s faithful sidekick: the Costello to her Abbott, the klutzy Jerry Lewis to her suave Dean Martin; the Gabrielle to her Xena, and the healer of her broken heart, sitting round the cauldron (a story for another day).



She may call me her ‘business associate’ on the G garb website, but I prefer the term sidekick. My experience of hats is wearing a motorcycle helmet, or a beanie to stop my ears dropping off in winter. Tres chic, ha ha - that's not a G garb hat in the picture above, by the way! Tracey is the hat lady and the expert, and I am her humble apprentice (except I’m older and wiser – the Sensible One, remember?)

We have been invited backstage at the Simply Red concert in Newmarket on 31 July. We have chosen our outfits, although Tracey, an avid wearer of runners, is allegedly hopeless in heels, so she’s been practising in her hallway. I, on the other hand, will stick to sensible shoes.

So – join us for our adventure, yes? It’s going to be a hoot!

A new Adventure – Betty & Thelma Hit the Road

This is a bit exciting. My good mate Thelma and I have teamed up, and we’re about to take England by storm!

In a couple of weeks I’ll be swapping my motorcycle helmet for a sophisticated cool G garb hat and flying away to the UK with Thelma (the Hat Lady of the Valley) for 10 days of Mad Hatterdom.

This has come out of the blue, you say. Well, only sort of. Thelma and I have been friends since our daughters were besties in Primary school. That’s so many years ago now that I’ve lost count. They were the days of swilling gin and tonics and Solid Gold Dancing.

Not much has changed. Thelma & I are older and wiser, and far more fun than we ever were back then. She’s still taller and skinnier than I am, and a far better cook, and I can still drink her under the table.

Thelma also has a great head for business, and for hats. I’m still finding my comfort zone and easing my way into hattiness.

The hats, though, are great – Kevin J. Robinson from Simply Red has been wearing one of Thelma’s hats during the current tour, and looking super stylish.

Watch this space to keep up with our adventure. We leave Oz on July 27 – a mere two weeks away, and EEK! I haven’t started packing!