The weather today is sunny and hot. Hot, hot, hot. I am in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, with Geoffrey. No coat required today. Just a shirt and a smile. I am a happy Kangaroo.

On Friday we were reunited with our son, Hugo, home from Warwick where he is studying Chemistry. He seemed thinner and taller. A milimetre further into adulthood and away from being my baby boy. The dismay I automatically felt when I saw his unshaven face evaporated as soon as he smiled. Hugo has a great smile.

Even though it is sunny this morning in Lisbon, thunderstorms are forecast for this afternoon. The run up to our wedding in April 1989, was just the same. I was ecstatic to have found Geoffrey on the other side of the world, after all, what were the odds, but it was the other side of the world.

The top floor of a terraced house in Battersea, which I shared with Nicky in the first months of life in London, was not my natural habitat. Nor was the little house Geoff and I had bought not far away to start our married life. I grew up in suburbia. With space and jacaranda and eucalyptus trees and heat and barbeques and kidney shaped swimming pools. I spent my weekends in the sunshine, swimming in frothy, pounding surf or in sea pools carved out of the rocky headlands.

I was delighted to see the sun making diamonds on the Atlantic sea, as we ate our breakfast on the roof top terrace of our hotel. And then I felt the familiar thump of homesickness grip my chest. As Peter Allen’s song goes, “I still call Australia home…” I call England home too. Can you love two countries? Yes you can. I do.

Leaving Australia also meant leaving my family and friends. Would my family love Geoffrey? When I told my father, Stan, over the phone that I was marrying Geoffrey, he said, “Who the bloody hell is Geoffrey?”

You can imagine my nerves when Stan the Man and Bev, my mother, together with my brother, Shaun, and his wife, Wendy, arrived to meet Geoffrey for the first time in London. We went to Heathrow to meet them. The first thing we could see was the tip of surfboards. Both Shaun and Wendy surfed in those days and had planned to hit the waves in Cornwall. Stan was holding a pair of Ugg boots for Geoffrey. The Aussie Battler was meeting the toff.

Dad was a typical Aussie Battler. An Aussie Battler is the sort of bloke that does an honest day’s work and despite the odds, makes a go of it. They are “fair dinkum”, meaning honest, true and fair. Stan was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Bev’s family were the posher ones. He was born on the outskirts of the CBD (Central Business District) of Sydney. When I was growing up, people with money did not live in the small terraced houses fringing the CBD. They lived in leafy suburbs, preferably on the water. This all changed in the 90s when the yuppies moved into the terraces and those areas were gentrified.  The same thing is happening in Lisbon with urban regeneration in areas like Principal Real.

Today we are going to walk around town and have lunch down by the sea.