Two shillings

AKA a couple of Bob.
In fact a couple of Bob McLellans. Both cousins of my father and both living in north Sydney. Strange how you can go for so long without seeing one and then two come along at the same time.
We had spent the morning raking around Darling Harbour then said good bye to our excellent boutique hotel “The Harbour Rocks” and took the ferry up river towards Parramatta. We were met at Rydlemere by Robert Arthur and Denise, his more genuinely Australian wife, and headed to Cherry Brook to call in on cousin Robert who is incapacitated physically by Parkinsons disease, but razor sharp mentally. Our conversation oscillated between the chemical structure of dopaminergic anti parkinsonian drugs and the invasion of Europe by Celts, Picts and Vikings. Later we were treated to some of cousin Bob’s Poetry which was more on the religious side than I had expected. Denise firmly steered Bob away from the larger second poem that he was keen to read us and we were later told that it concerned the death of his son aged 18 in a RTA. Apparently the subject matter was heart breaking  and usually provoked significant emotional distress. 

We left feeling enlightened and educated and headed to Windsor for dinner in a local RSL club. There we met my second cousin Iain McLellan and his family Jocinta, Chelsea and Cooper. Whilst we ate, they scooped up a large percentage of the in house raffle, and as we limped back to our digs in Wilberforce we took several pigs and lambs with us in the guise of BBQ packs to be devoured over the next few days.