At Bendigo

John Martin met me at Melbourne - a welcoming smile over the waiting crowd at Arrivals. He drove 150 kilometres on flawless, near empty, ironbark lined roads to his and Annie's Bendigo home. After a decade of drought it's rained quite generously here - water soaked up by ground so long parched that there's still little sign of it in rivers or lakes. We talked, stopped for steak pies and coffees in Malmesbury and later, ate a light meal with friends in fresh Spring sunshine. Later we worked on final details for the first of seven seminars John's organised across the continent on Political-Management Leadership: Negotiating the Overlap. We're back in Melbourne on Sunday to fly west to the Indian Ocean, to work in Belmont on the edge of Perth. It's 2300 here - 10 hours earlier than England where it's about 1300 - the time I'm feeling though I'm off to bed feeling chipper, having had but an hour's sleep in the 38 hours since I left Birmingham Airport at 2200 on Thursday.