More or less straight after we arrived in Australia, we began looking for a place to stay for a couple of weeks over Christmas (don’t worry readers, you’re not going mad — this blog trails reality by a week or two, remember?). A short-term let should work out a good deal cheaper than staying at a hostel and will put an end to the queue for the cooker/shower/toilet/basin — if only temporarily.

So far we’ve not been too impressed with what we’ve seen: a small, shared city-pad in Perth with a slimy landlord (Squiffy’s words, not mine), a reasonable room in a massive house (with swimming pool) close to the beach but miles away from anything else and a twelve bedroom shared-kitchen/bathroom no-parents-to-clean-up-after-the-kids dive just north of Perth city complete with a drug dealer’s telephone number handily scribbled onto the gatepost. Oh, and three policemen finger-printing a car parked right outside the gate.

And then we found this place. A compact and bijou studio apartment a short bus ride from Fremantle town, close to shops and a beach. It’s brand new and the owner is a very likeable and reasonable fellow. Unlike the other accommodation that we looked at, the kitchen and bathroom are not shared and so we’d have the full run of the place to ourselves. This is the one for us, we thought, and happily exchanged our monies for a set of keys.

We immediately set about home-making — staying still in a place of our own for two weeks is a very rare opportunity for us. In fact, we’ve not had a private place of our own since this time last year, when we were in my family’s apartment in Spain.