Summer holidays this year were a quick trip to Japan to show off the newest member of the family. The flight over was as trying as I'd feared - absolutely impossible to watch a movie or sleep when there's a crying child nearby, and especially when that crying child is yours. Air France didn't help though - rubbish service to go along with their rubbish food. The cold indifference of airport security staff was worse than all of them though. In Japan, despite being the so-called "rainy season" it was actually an even 35 degrees the entire time and really humid. The kind of weather where you just sit on the ground staring into space, sweating. It was too hot to do anything much other than loiter in convenience stores, abusing their air conditioning and looking for new exciting Pepsi flavours or Happoshu brands. I did get to have a look at the now tallest skyscraper in Japan (not including the sky tree) and had a quick trip to a Kyoto shrine, thankfully cool under the maple leaves).

The clocks go forward this coming weekend for British summertime. Summertime!!? Everyone is still busy freezing our asses off. It was snowing the other day and I bet this Easter weekend I'll see snow again. Nothing to do but stare out at the bald trees and gray sky. Take me back Sydney, all is forgiven.

This week has been hot. Waay too hot. Last Tuesday it was 33C at midnight and today it just hung around 41C for most of the afternoon and evening (it was still 35 at midnight!). I thought I'd experienced this sort of thing last year but it seems that this week's run of 30+ days has broken some 150 year record for Sydney. With all the flooding in the rest of Australia and the huge Cyclone this week the weather is truly crazy here. 75% of Australia's banana crop has been wiped out and already the prices have double in the supermarket. Thankfully the prices aren't quite what they've been advertised in work.. Update: ok that's a huge change in the space of 24 hours! It started out in the mid 30's this afternoon when we went to a shopping centre to abuse their air-con (just like everyone else) but when we came out literally a couple of hours later it was 20! Thats a whopping 21-degree drop in 24 hours..

It looks like the Aussie spring has lasted all of two weeks. It jumped from 18 to 30 degrees in the space of a day which was pretty impressive. Unless this IS the spring, in which case I don't want to know what summer is like. Last weekend we were strolling around a few parks in the city centre and managed to grab some snaps of what would be considered pretty exotic birds back home..