swansea

Yesterday, for a second time this year, I find myself in Newcastle. Maps and advice are in short supply at the airport. Lizard and I must navigate our way in a hire car across town to Swansea, thirty-three kilometres south of the city.

In the absence of advice or map I use my smartphone to guide us through town, but can’t get enough of ‘town’ on screen to instruct Lizard, who’s behind the wheel. We end by going the long way round, but we get there.

We’re here to present two days of SKIPS training to 20 or so local school counsellors at Swansea RSL.

Our accommodation is Rafferty’s Resort at Cams Wharf, a hot deal Lizard has scored through Scoopon, including $50 off an evening meal and free continental breakfasts for four. The resort consists of 150 apartments on several acres on the shore of Lake Macquarie. The resort roads are corrugated with speed humps. Many apartments have For Sale signs in the windows.

Each apartment is a clone of every other, each as soulless as only a hotel, motel or resort can be. This one also lacks power points, has leaves piled at the door, a buggered television, lights too dim to read by.

We settle in, go through our plan for the next two days. We drive back to Swansea, visit the RSL, check the room for tomorrow, then tour Swansea, but find no decent place to eat. We return to the restaurant at the resort. The food is good.

For two days we train our counsellors; they love SKIPS, its simplicity, that it asks nothing of schools or teachers, gives them so much in understanding, confidence and strategies to work with families where a parent is mentally ill. Guest speaker Sandy, insanity consultant, lesbian with schizophrenia, makes them laugh, says she’s experienced more stigma from hating feta cheese than her illness.

Over dinner Sandy and I discover our mutual dislike for smelly cheese, water sports, and horses. We agree that gays and lesbians should have the same right to marry as hetero couples but marvel at the silliness of them wanting to get married at all. It seems only right to her to propose that she and I should marry.  

When it’s all over I’m incredibly tired but drive us by memory across Newcastle to the airport via Edith, Lorna and Maud Streets. Sandy thinks this a miracle. She’s right.

Rock on.