The world is your lobster: Lane Cove

Lane Cove - a suburb on the Lower North Shore of Sydney. Gour and Marianne lived there in Fox Street. (Number 8 rings a bell but I could be totally wrong - anyway here's a street view of number 8 twenty years later).

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Gour and Mazza put me up for a few weeks in their spare room and when Oz finally saw the light he gave up his encyclopedia sales and joined us in Fox Street. Books sold - zero apparently. I was working for Gour on a project at the NSW Dept of Sport, Recreation and Racing (more of this later) in North Sydney. Mazza used to drop Gour and I off in North Sydney each morning and it was on one of these trips that she informed me that she was pregnant. Back in my young, free and single, backpacking days that was a concept that didn't really compute. The scale and significance was lost on me. She may as well have said that she had indigestion!

Mazza could never remember Oz's name for some reason - she always referred to him as Mike or Bruce or something. Eventually it became a running joke to deliberately call him something else. Anyway, Gour and Marianne had a friend coming from overseas to stay so Oz and I had to move out. We had no transport, Lane Cove was the only area of Sydney we knew, our budget was small and we only wanted a 3 or 4 month let. We went perusing the local real estate agents and in the window of Blunts "The Professionals" we found our dream dwelling.

We hurriedly moved into a 2-bed unit in 33-41 Stokes Street, Lane Cove. A short term let and a brisk walk to the centre of Lane Cove and in the other direction the station at Artarmon.

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Not your usual backpacker location but it suited us. i.e. we didn't know any better. The flat seemed ideal but very soon our 2 bed place would have 5 residents and only two would be sharing a bed. There also seemed to be quite a few other residents of the small flea-like kind living in the 1970s shag pile carpet. Hels and Kate were two friends of Oz's that were also backpacking and had just arrived in Sydney. We met up with them for a drink and shortly afterwards they moved in, paying a token peppercorn rent to sleep under our table and on the couch ! Not long after that, Beth arrived from the UK to spend a few months living in sin with Oz and to join our travels for a short while.