We've survived moving house (twice!) and two street parties in as many weeks in our new home of Lockhart. Last weekend was our first foray into the Spirit of the Land, an annual art and sculpture festival held in Lockhart. It draws crowds of 6000 people over two days so it was an ambitious start to our new careers as cafe proprietors but it was a great chance to meet the locals and give them a small taste of things to come at the Blue Bird Cafe. Roger and I (with the much appreciated help of relatives) got out on the street with the other market stall holders and local business people to enliven the festival atmosphere.

Our plan was to offer scoop ice cream and granitas so when the weather turned chilly and grey earlier in the week (with roads in the Blue Mountains even blocked by snow!) we thought we had made the wrong choice of fare. However lady luck and the weather gods smiled on us and by Saturday the weather was brightening. The four of us were flat stick pulling granitas and scooping cones. It seemed that the crowds appreciated the tradition of old-fashioned ice cream flavours of Hokey Pokey, choc mint, passionfruit and rum and raisin. But mostly it was our chance to meet everyone in town...and I think we may very well have achieved that! They all had lovely words of welcome to our new home and pledges of support once we are open.

But the nicest thing was meeting members of the Veneris and Matis familes who came from all over NSW for the festival and to take a trip down memory lane by visiting the Blue Bird where they spent their childhoods and formative years. We felt bad that they were seeing the cafe at her worst, broken and bruised. We considered that it would be hardly recognisable to them but they still found enough in the shell to trigger memories and tears. Their support for our efforts was heart-warming and we only hope that we can do their memories and their faith in our vision for the future of the Blue Bird, justice. We can but try and we will do our best to live up to the expectations of the family and of Lockhart.

Welcome to our new venture. This is going to sound like one of those mid-life crisis stories..you know the ones where the disillusioned city folk make a change to an exotic location to feel better about life. You might think that you have already read "A Year in Provence" or "Under the Tuscan Sun" and you know how the story goes. It usually starts out with some successful writer or journalist feeling in need of a change. If you are anything like me, you will have read those novels, seen the movie, whatever, and thought..how wonderful would that be but I'm just an ordinary person without the budget of Hollywood, and I need to hold down a steady job just to keep myself off the breadline. That's how this story goes. And it's true. I was raised to work honest, work hard and play it safe in a profession (namely librarian) that would provide for me till I retire. Except...

Except that, in these uncertain times I found myself in my fortieth year, staring down the barrel of thirty more years of work (yep, my money is on the retirement age going up by another five years). And here I was in an industry that quite frankly, is starting to concern me. I get the sinking feeling that the future for books and careers for librarians may not be as solid as I expected when I bit the bullet and did my library degree. I heard in the news the other day that a school library in Adelaide has given all their books away and is clearing out the space to become one big empty study area for students on e-books and laptops. When I started out twenty years ago in community public library service, I did not anticipate that in my lifetime, there might be a generation of kids who may never have the pleasure of going to the library for, an actual book. It was a different world and a different library service twenty years ago and while, good on them, libraries and librarians have been working like ducks on a pond to move with the times, that pleasure and comfort of books may not last another twenty more years of my career. Apart from helping people and making a difference in their lives, it is after all what I love about the library. So I would miss the pleasure of books in my work too much I think. If I am starting to sound like a dinosaur then c'est la vie..books are great. And don't get me wrong, libraries are still amazing community places but I am looking to the future, my future and if there is ever a time to change and do something different with it, the time is now. Leave it any longer and that Little Doubting Guy that sits on everyone's shoulder will be telling me I'm too set in my ways, just keep playing it safe. So, it is time for a change, a tree-change, a lifestyle change, a risk yeah but the chance that that risk will be the adventure of a lifetime. So here it is...

The Blue Bird Cafe in a town called Lockhart NSW. Population about 1298, about to be boosted by the arrival of Roger and Louise to make it to thirteen hundred (with a bit of poetic license). More on that story to come...