I had wondered why my parents timed their trip to Australia as they did: early enough for me to not yet have a work visa and to still have a host of relocation concerns, but late enough for my money supply to be laughably indiscernible. But now I know why.

It's so we can spend vast amounts of cash taking them to places so that my dad can tut, sigh, swear and complain. I knew he was skilled in this field before, of course, but it was only as we drove down the Gr'Ocean Road that I discovered he's been working on doing all four at the same time.

So, as we meandered along the boring inland bits of one of Australia's top five tourist attractions, you'd hear a "Tchaaah - [expletive]!" from the back every time there was a bump in the road. Just to clarify, the "Tchaaah" is a mixed tut and sigh, the whole expression counts as a complaint and the expletives are randomly selected range from a sadly limited range of "Christ" (with optional prefix of "Jesus"), "S**t", "Bloody hell", and there was one F-bomb when I took a corner at 5km/h too quickly for his liking.

It's a very long road. Marina had to suppress constant fits of giggles.

Luckily, he only keeps this behaviour up whenever he's awake. He slept through the coastal parts of the (Great Ocean) road.

It's astounding, actually, what he manages to complain about. Flies for instance. Not collectively, which might evoke one or two understandable grumblings from even the most patient of people, but each individual fly. Every time he sees one. Every single time. Also, he has a top that "attracts crumbs" [when he spills them down his front], that got him going for a few minutes. He doesn't like the fact that half-pint glasses are called "pots". And the weather is either too hot or too cold, but I'm sure by this point you'll already have worked that out.

So, his new nickname is "Tourette's", and I've often wondered how my mum's gotten this far through life with him without developing some sort of cunning mental defence mechanism. Then, the night they arrived she said this: "It's funny, isn't it, that in England, in June, it's quite warm, whereas in Australia, in June, it's quite cold. And yet it's still June. It's impossible to imagine, isn't it? In England, at Christmas, it's cold and it snows, but in Australia, at Christmas, it's quite warm and they'll have barbeques and things. Whereas in England it would be really cold because it's in the middle of December. Christmas. Cold. Or warm in Australia. It's amazing, isn't it? You just can't get your head around it, can you?"

So, that'll be the mechanism then. Permanent bewilderment.