A CHANGE OF SCENE

by Rebecca Varcoe –

For years I thought moving to a seaside town was reserved for old people or actors in Australian TV dramas (specifically ones named SeaChange). But in 2020 something happened (what could it be!?) that made me and my husband consider greener, wider pastures. I’ll give you one guess what global incident incited such itchy feet.

It’s not that we didn’t like our neighbourhood – we loved it! It had a pizza place that sounded amazing, but that we never visited. There was a cool pub a 10-minute walk away that we went to once. The artisanal ice-cream shop on the hip strip felt more like a bar. Maybe what I’m saying is that we loved the idea of our neighbourhood.

But, after a tricky year (why was 2020 tricky? Who knows?) we thought: now is the time for a sea change. Now we will create our own cool neighbourhood by the ocean. We will eat ice-cream not on the street but on the sand! We will frequent cosy pubs where the locals know us by name! We will gentrify – not in the bad way, but in the culturally sensitive immersive way! When we pulled up to our new digs, out came my mother-in-law to welcome us to our new home. Oh, sorry, did I not mention our sea change came with a caveat? We moved both to the sea, and into the home of my husband’s mother, and her husband, and their elderly dog – the world’s only unfriendly