Australia famously discovered a more varied cuisine well before the British Isles, which leads me to suspect that it was partly the Ozzy influx into London that turned the mother country on to progressive cuisine, but then again it might have been the endless parade of foody TV.

Newtown was the student area of Sydney and still is except for the fact that prices have risen to more affluent levels, but every second shop seems to be a restaurant from a different part of the globe so we obliged by eating Thai the first night of our stay and at an African restaurant the second.

We stayed with an old friend that I met 17 years ago in Manali, in the North of India. When we met Rob was messing about with concepts to do with 3d computer graphics so we talked about the computer revolution and what was to come. It seemed all the more apocryphal seeing as I was now making websites and wandering the globe with a laptop after having investigated the realms of computer video and music. It made such a short period of time seem like a thousand years had passed, which is the mark of the modern age.