29) Curried Prawns

Every bag of groceries that we delivered was supposed to have a sticky label attached to it with a number that corresponded to the larger label that contained the customer’s name, address and telephone number. Occasionally the labels would fall off and we would have to ask each customer if the unlabelled packet belonged to them. I remember one such packet that had apple pies in it and when we showed it to a gentleman he said that he was very sorry that it wasn’t, as his wife was giving him stew for dinner and he would much rather have apple pies. Once or twice we got to the end of the day with a packet of groceries that had no number or name on it and no one had claimed it. All we could do was take it back to the store and hope that someone would claim it the next day.

We were only obliged to take the parcels to the front door but as most of our customers were elderly and we always wanted to give a good service we usually took the shopping into the kitchen and the ladies appreciated it. One day we delivered groceries to a regular customer who lived in one of the retirement villages. The next morning when we went into Coles one of the staff asked us if we had seen a packet of frozen curried prawns. We assured her that we had not and she told us that our customer had phoned in to ask what had happened to her curried prawns, as she could not find them. We had not been particularly busy the previous day and had not had any problems with labels. We were pretty sure that if the lady had bought the prawns we had delivered them but we checked in the car and in the large freezer at the rear of the store but no prawns could be found.

The staff at Coles were always so polite and helpful to the customers (The customer is always right?) so they told the lady that if she brought her till docket in the next time she was in the store they would replace her lost packet of Curried Prawns. We went off and did some more deliveries and when we came back all the girls were having a good laugh. The front of store manager for the day told us that the lady had rung back about her prawns. She had found them in her freezer, she had no idea how they got there she said, “Jonny must have put them there” The Coles staff thought it was hilariously funny to think of Jonny sneaking in to the kitchen and hiding the packet in the freezer. We always tried to give a good service and help where we could but we did not go that far. I would often joke with the customers that I could make a fortune if I started a service putting the groceries away in the cupboards and they always said “Yes please, I hate that job” Can you imagine it? One would get phone calls all day “Marina where did you put the baked beans/corn flakes/ toilet rolls or whatever?”

28) Erina Fair

Erina Fair is a very large shopping centre, with three supermarkets, three big department stores, a cinema, a skating rink, a library, a gymnasium, a post office and goodness only knows how many restaurants, clothes and shoe shops. There are chemists, banks, jewellers travel agents, bookshops, sports shops, hairdressers, furniture stores, butchers, fish shops, mobile phone shops and shops that just sell sunglasses. There are doctors’ offices, along with opticians and hearing aid specialists, all doing at least enough business to pay the rent and the staff. It is no wonder when we first came to Australia we thought that all Australians must be very wealthy and that there was no poverty whatsoever in this country.

There are a couple of “Eateries”. How Jonny hates that word. A number of shops selling different kinds of food all clustered together around a central space for tables and chairs. The clients buy their meal form whichever type of food they fancied. Hamburgers, or Fish and Chips, Salads or Kebabs, Portuguese or Chinese and sit at any of the tables to eat it. We thought this was a great idea. If four people went out to eat together and one wanted a Hamburger another a Chinese meal another some salad and the forth wanted Fish and chips they did not have to argue about where they would eat. They could all buy the food they wanted and still sit together to eat. Once when Dominic came to the Central Coast on business he called into the Fair and took us to lunch. He introduced us to Kebabs. To me a Kebab was pieces of diced meat and vegetables on a wooden skewer and cooked. The Kebabs that Dominic bought us were very different. Large savoury pancakes piled high with slices of meat and all sorts of vegetables with a very tasty sauce poured over then the pancake is rolled up and tucked in at the ends. Very tasty! Yes “eateries” are a great idea; it was just the name that we did not like. Eatery sounds such a made up word.

The amount of ladies clothes shops amazed me. Who was going to buy all those cloths? There were quite a few cloths shops that only sold very dressy cloths. Racks and racks of elegant and expensive dresses but everywhere we looked we saw the Australian women dressed very casually. I know we don’t go out at night much but the people I have spoken to about this say that the ladies don’t often dress up to go to the theatre or to a club so I have always been puzzled how those shops stay in business.

Other shops that puzzled me were the sunglasses shops. How many pairs of sunglasses does one have to sell to pay the rent, which isn’t cheap I’m sure. But there are a number of shops in The Fair that sell sunglasses and nothing else so there must be lots of people buying sunglasses. Maybe they keep loosing them and have to replace them often.

That also makes me think of the shops that sell electronic equipment. The other day we got a catalogue for one such shop popped into our letterbox. As I paged through it I was amazed to see how many television sets there were on offer. Just out of curiosity I counted the different models, there were 32 of them. Ranging form a few hundred dollars right up to the enormously expensive $8000 one. I expect that each branch of that chain of stores has to have at least one, maybe more, of all they have on offer and the chain has stores most fair sized towns in New South Wales. That’s without the Radios, Hi-Fi Systems, Computers, Digital Cameras, iPods, fridges, stoves, washing machines, and a myriad of other domestic appliances. Imagine how much electronic equipment is sitting on shelves throughout the country, it is a scary thought. All of it will have to be disposed of some day or other.


When they did the latest alterations and extensions to Erina Fair they advertised it as the “Largest Single Level Shopping Centre In the Southern Hemisphere”. When we were living in Durban in South Africa a new shopping Centre called The Pavilion was built and they said that it was the Largest Shopping Centre in the Southern Hemisphere (not on a single level though). I wondered then how does one measure a shopping centre. Is it by the number of shops or the amount of square feet of shop space? Is all the public area included in the size or just the shops? Are staircases, lifts, gardens and playgrounds included in the count? I also think tagging the phrase “in the Southern Hemisphere” on to the end is a bit of a cheek. After all most of the industrialised countries of the world are in the Northern Hemisphere so it does lessen the competition considerably, doesn’t it?

27) Mr. Go-With-The-Flow.

Eventually Mr. & Mrs. Go-With-The-Flow became too frail to come to the shops on their own so they had a carer who would drive them in help them with the shopping and take them home again. They did not need us to deliver their groceries any more but they would always say Hello when we saw them in the store and if we weren’t busy we would have coffee with them and spend a little time chatting. They liked the hustle and bustle of the shopping centre and would often come in on their own on the bus if they did not have any shopping to carry home.

One day when we were very busy we came up the escalator in front of Coles and saw Mrs. Go-With-The-Flow sitting on one of the benches surrounded by security guards. She looked very flustered and confused so we went and spoke to her to ask if there was anything we could do. She was pleased to see a familiar face but explained that there was not much we could do as the security guards were doing all that could be done. She could not find her husband. She said one minute he was there beside her and the next he was gone. To make matters worse he had taken her walking frame with him and because she could not walk more than a step or two without it she could not look for him, so she had had to call on security for help. She assured us that they were being very kind and that she was in good hands. As we were particularly busy that day we said that we would have to go and do the rest of our deliveries but promised to check that she was alright when we came back.

We had a pretty long run with lots of parcels to drop off so it was at least two hours by the time we got back to check on her but by then Mr. Go-With-The-Flow had been found and they had both been put in a taxi and taken home. The security guard told us that they had found the old man right out of the shopping complex and at the end of Karalta road, doing a high speed getaway on his wife’s Zimmer Frame. He had no idea where he was or where he was going which is quite sad but we had to laugh at the thought of him Going-With-The-Flow down Karalta Road. Probably at a speed of about 5 hours per kilometre. Was he running away like a naughty child or was he remembering his time in the navy and going off to join up once again?

26) Nick Names

We were building up a larger and larger number of clients and some times it was difficult to remember who was who. To identify our customers we began giving them nicknames. At one house the first time we delivered there the lady had put a sign “Please remove your shoes” at the doorstep so she became the Shoes off Lady. Another lady on our first delivery told us how she would tell all the people in her village that they must use our service so we called her the Sergeant Major. The lady who told us about the trouble she was having with her dentist was The Lady with the Teeth. At a house with a Doberman dog in the back yard we had The Doberman Lady. In a suburb of modern brick houses was a lone attractive wooden house so we called that lady The Lady in the Wooden House. One lady had just bought a new fridge and complained to us that it was too small so she became the Fridge lady. There was the Home Husband and the Coat Hanger Lady. Some were known by their pets; Heidi’s Mummy or Boris’s daddy. The Home Husband was a divorced man, bringing his family up on his own and the Coat Hanger Lady would give me a pretty covered coat hanger every time we delivered her groceries. I thanked her and told her that she did not need to do that but she was insistent. “I give everybody who delivers anything here one my dear” she said and I imagined a great big strong delivery man, all muscles and hairy arms walking out with a pretty pink, lace trimmed coat hanger. Heidi was a lively Maltese poodle that Jonny would always bring a titbit for. She was soon so used to her treat from Jonny that her ‘Mummy’ told us that on Friday mornings she would sit near the door anticipating Jonny ‘s arrival. When her owner filled in the docket in Coles she would not enter her real name but would write ‘Heidi’s Mummy’. Boris was a lovely standard Schnauzer, when he heard the car he would run up to the upstairs balcony and tell the whole neighbourhood that his Dad’s groceries had arrived.

One of our favourites was THAT woman. The very first time we delivered to her we could not find her unit. I had to phone her and ask her how to get there. Then when we got there we found that we had not delivered her pizzas. We knew it was our fault for not checking in the fridge for an extra packet so we just went back to Franklins store to find it. THAT woman told me much later that she thought on that first delivery “We’ve got a right couple of idiots here”. The next time she shopped at Erina Fair she chose to buy from Coles and was surprised to see the same ‘couple of idiots’ arrive with her goods. We asked her if she had changed shops to get away from us and she said no but we were not completely convinced. Once she got to know us and we were giving her good service she was a good friend and forgave us all sorts of things. One week she had bought a case of beer, which by the way the Australians call a ‘slab of beer’. As Jonny took it out of the car he broke on of the bottles. She was not very pleased with that but forgave us. The next day we bought another bottle of beer to replace the breakage and then all was well again. She had a great sense of humour and teased us as much as we teased her. She would always find some cheeky comment to put on the docket and she would always fill in her name as THAT WOMAN.

One lovely couple were Mr. & Mrs. Go-With-The-Flow. They were both in their late eighties and Mrs. Go-With-The-Flow was not too well physically and needed a walking frame but was as sharp as a new pin and told us all about her life and her family. Unfortunately Mr. Go-With-The-Flow seemed fit and active but the years had taken their toll on his mental capacity and he suffered form a touch of dementia. He would get very mixed up when he told us about his life. He told us stories of his life the British navy during the Second World War he usually finished his stories by telling us that “If you want to get on in the world you have to Go With The Flow”