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It is hard to believe that you are already reading our Autumn 2012 Newsletter. How can it be autumn already, what happened to summer?

Jeannine and I were in New Zealand meeting family and friends for three weeks over Christmas and we had a fantastic sunny first week but must admit that we then suffered two weeks where it rained a lot. That didn't matter too much because we were visiting family and friends most of the time and we knew that when we got back to Melbourne the sun would be shining encouraging us to get out to into the fresh air and onto the beach.

We landed in Melbourne in mid-January and as soon as we left the plane we thought that we had landed at Heathrow and walked into an English winter. We were frozen. There were hailstones, and storms that ripped or shredded trees between the airport and home. We drove along Kingsway and there were branches and debris all along the road. When we got home we looked at our back garden and came to the conclusion that there must have been a massive growth spurt while we were away, the foliage seemed to have grown to the point where the lawn seemed to be about half the area of when we left. I soon found out that it wasn't growth that had reduced the lawn size, it was the storm we had just driven through that had brought down the centre of a large tree which was now spread over the lawn. So what happened to summer?

We hope that all of our readers had a great Christmas and holiday break. The kids are back at school and normality is setting in. We are starting off this Newsletter with a new item that has just come onto the horizon and requires urgent attention.