SO here’s the thing. What do you make of an Airbnb rental that doesn’t come with a kettle? Now there is much to love about where we are living for a week, but the absent kettle confused us.

We looked everywhere, opened all the cupboards. Where do Australians hide their kettles? I rang the owner, who’d left the key under the front-door mat for us.

“The house is lovely,” I said. “But we can’t find the kettle.”

“We don’t have one,” our host replied. “You’ll find pans in that big drawer at the end of the kitchen. We boil water in those.”

We’d had a longish day in the vomit-yellow hire car and, being Brits, we fancied a cup of tea. Since Monday we have been making tea and coffee using a pan. This works fine but is still oddly unsettling, because how can you have a house without a kettle? A kitchen without a kettle is, well, like a vomit-yellow car without an engine. And say what you like about that car but it went fine, once I’d quarantined my left leg.

There is something so comforting about the boiling roll of a kettle. And it’s a lot less fiddly than tipping boiling water from a pan into a glass teapot. Yes, you read that right: a glass teapot. Anyway, I am drinking tea made that way as I type this.

After making tea without a kettle on arrival, I fancied a beer and got one from the fridge. Then I couldn’t find a bottle opener anywhere, and didn’t feel it would be reasonable to phone the owner. Later we went into a bottle shop – that’s what they call them over here – and asked if we could buy a bottle-opener. “Buy? I’ve got one you can have for free somewhere, mate.”

The bottle-opener was found and I promised to return to buy a bottle, and I’ve not done that yet. Incidentally, supermarkets here don’t sell alcohol, hence all those bottle shops.

There is one other negative about this lovely house in East Fremantle: it’s close to a busy highway, but the owner emailed a warning just after we booked. And it’s worth the noise because the house is great.

In the welcome pack, the owner calls it “a beautiful heritage home” and he’s not wrong. It’s a little like a Victorian terrace cottage that’s been tastefully modernised. You walk up the front steps to an old door that opens to reveal a long hallway. There is a bedroom at the front, another beyond that, then a sitting area that leads to a kitchen and dining spot, with a mini-study where I am writing this and drinking pan-boiled tea. Behind me there is a loo and shower, and outside the door there is a decking area, with washing machine and garden sink under cover. Beyond that lies a small walled garden.

All the floors in the house have been sanded and given a high-gloss varnish; and there are nice design touches everywhere, with small extensions expanding the space. Everything is arty and comfortable and there is even an old leather chair that swivels.

Although we’ve run our own mini-Airbnb business for a while now, this is only the second time we have used the online booking service. The other time was to rent a room in a large Victorian house in Bristol, where the wife was friendly enough but the husband looked permanently pained about having strangers in his house.

Airbnb has been good for us. Most of our guests leave happy, and we earn a little extra. But the headlines are often negative nowadays, with fears of people causing housing problems by cashing in on Airbnb. I’ve no idea where our owner lives when he’s not here; perhaps he has another house. But this one is homely and full of all his stuff and pictures, almost as if he’d just popped out, possibly to buy a kettle.

THE car we hired was a lurid colour. We couldn’t settle on the tone. I suggested vomit yellow and my wife said it was a sort of green – if so, a green that should never be seen. But it was easy to spot in a car park.

We picked the car up in the middle of Perth, close to the highway. All I had to do was drive to the end of the road and take the second turning on the left. I took the first turning on the left.

This left us having to go around a huge block in the middle of the city, unsettling with me jumping and lurching. Most cars in Australia are automatics and I hadn’t driven one since a holiday to the States years ago. I kept using my left foot on the brake, pushing my leg down as if operating the clutch on our car at home, throwing my passengers forward. Then I remembered that the left foot is redundant in an automatic: do everything ‘right’ and the car behaves.

We reached the highway and headed south to Busselton for a weekend break with our daughter.

The day before, we’d been for a walk with our friends M&A in the John Forrest National Park on the Darling Scarp, east of Perth, named after the Victorian explorer and first premier of Western Australia. The walk was same but different: like the walks we do at home, but through pea-gravel scrublands with wonderful bursts of spring flowers (and a kangaroo or two).

Afterwards we had tea and cake in a roadside café – same but different again, with a road train rattling by filled with live sheep. The stink reached across the road.

At the holiday village in Busselton, the wi-fi was rubbish so this is a catch-up. The town is famous for its jetty, built 152 years ago and running to 1.841 kilometres. The jetty has been restored and rebuilt and in parts you can see the old wooden structure in the sea.

A train runs the length of the jetty, but we walked along, watching as Saturday anglers fished for squid, whose black ink stained the jetty. As we returned, the mist came down and the land disappeared, yet by the time we had lunch in a restaurant overlooking the jetty, the sun was strong enough to burn us a little as we ate outside.

The next day, we had breakfast in a bush café, then went into Dunsborough for shops, a gallery and so on, and a walk along the beach. It was a bit chilly and as everyone keeps telling us, it is winter here, or only just spring, and they’re keeping their coats on, even as I go out in T-shirt and shorts, shivering with defiance. Days have been warm or a bit chilly. Sometimes there has been rain.

After Dunsborough, we visited an olive farm and a brewery/winery in Eagle Bay in the Meelup regional park, then walked along a coastal path below the Cape Naturaliste lighthouse, looking for whales.

And we saw some – too distant for photographic proof, but there all right, exposing a fin or flashing a tail, and blowing water out. Now that was a thrill, and mysterious to think of those huge creatures mostly hidden from sight, but shyly announcing themselves as we watched from the path.

Yesterday, I drove the vomit-yellow-green Toyota back to Perth, and we travelled expensively by taxi from the car hire place to our Airbnb in Fremantle, named after Captain Charles H Fremantle, who arrived to claim the place for King George IV in 1829. We arrived to claim the place for ourselves for a week.

WE saw more of Perth yesterday, visiting the art gallery, then doing a self-guided walking trail called Convicts & Colonials. Or a self-getting-lost tour, as we’re good at that.

Later, we had a meal at the house where our daughter is working as an au pair, which was lovely.

Returning home fairly late, we watched TV for the first time, tuning into a political comedy called Mad As Hell. I’m not sure what the Brit equivalent might be – a cross between Have I Got News For You and The Mash Report (BBC2’s latest attempt at news satire: slow to start but it had something about it, mixing topical jokes and silly parodies).

Mad As Hell is a political sketch show hosted by Shaun Micaleff, a grey-haired straight-man who presents as a sort of exasperated newsreader. I didn’t get all the jokes, but even without the political context, it was very amusing.

But it was interesting to watch a show where you needed to have all the triggers explained – especially if you’re a bit of a politics-head who likes to know what’s what. Here, my finger wasn’t on the button – barely even knew where the button was.

Luckily, our friends were on hand to explain the context, and even without that it was very funny. We don’t learn a lot about Australian politics at home, apart from the odd snatch, such as Pauline Hanson, the veteran nutcase nasty who wore a burqa in parliament as a horrible stunt. I guess you might say that she’s their Nigel Farage, only with a different sort of slime.

Maybe they should get themselves a Trump, as that brings the world’s eyes to your door, along with associated horrors.

Anyway, I am typing this at the breakfast table, which is very rude, and this morning we are going out for a walk in the hills, so I’d better put away my typing fingers, and walking into the shower.

IT IS 2.30am and we are up, stumbling around. A cup of tea and a stumble more, and the taxi comes. I booked online, then phoned to check last night. “No, don’t have that one,” said the man. “Ah, wait a minute – it’s on the wrong page.”

Ah, the panic of travel. But the taxi comes and now we are on the train with the other ghosts. The carriage is spectral until Leeds, when the train bursts with raucous girls and a bustle of boys eating McDonald’s.

A young woman, tall and glam in a tight red dress, asks if the train stops at Huddersfield – with the ‘H’ gone missing – in a voice to wake the dead and the other passengers. They troop past us and the train shakes with noise as their night-out mugs the early start to our day. A sleepy young woman diagonally opposite, wrapped in a shawl, can see what’s going on. She looks at me and smiles a smile that’s hardly there.

The noisy girls and the burger boys leave at Huddersfield and quiet returns. We arrive at Manchester Airport with hours and yawns to spare, to wait in that no man’s land of shops and bars and pints of beer at dislocated hours.

Not us, just two coffees and no breakfast because it’s early and we’ll be eating on the plane, only the flight ends up 90 minutes late, the drinks trolley comes first – no thanks, not yet – and then breakfast is a strange airline meal at some weird hour.

Two more of those meals arrive at stranger times. Talking of strange times, we’ve already set our watches to Perth time – a good tip, that one, and many ‘wrong’ hours later, having stopped briefly in Abu-Dhabi, we have ten more hours to go, and here’s the thing about flying to Perth: there is nothing between Abu-Dhabi and Perth but ocean, hours and hours of ocean.

Then we are at the airport, met by our old friend and our daughter, who is here for the best part of a year. Now we are at our friends’ house in Perth, where we drink tea and shower off the flight, and try to stay awake.

We all go out for a meal, then the three of us peel off for a walk into the city and a drink. After a couple of hours, we leave our daughter and decide to walk to our friends’ house, a plan more bold than sensible, and 40 minutes or so later, we phone for help and a rescue.

Now we sit around, talking. And here’s the thing, you see. We met our friends M&A years ago, when we rented rooms in their house in London, and became good friends. It’s how my wife and me met, but we haven’t all been under the same roof since we moved north in 1988.

M&A emigrated to Australia shortly after we left London, and raised their three children here. The youngest wasn’t much more than a baby then, now she has a baby of her own. The eldest used to sort of see me as his Dad Number Two, and he has two children now. The third ‘child’ lives on the other side of this gigantic country, so we don’t meet her.

Old stories are told again, with new ones butting in, and we stay awake until bedtime, then sleep till morning, hours of sleep, apart from an hour awake, where I read Oliver Twist.

Yesterday was our first full day here and we trekked round King’s Park and the botanical garden (above). We got lost, found our way again and I walked along while photographs were taken of plants: it takes a while with a plant-obsessed wife, but this place truly is fantastic, with high walkways and views over the river back to the city. And lots of plants.

Anyway, that’s us. Over here and Down Under. Still not quite believing that we got ourselves organised. Now I need to go online to book a car for a three-day jaunt to the south.

MICHAEL O’Leary, the famously lippy boss of Ryanair, guards his mouth more than he used to. Not difficult, perhaps, for the man who once said: “Germans will crawl bollock-naked over broken glass to get low fares.”

Tact is not his thing, although he can he self-aware – but perhaps only in the way that Donald Trump is aware of himself all the time, and aware only of himself.

Here’s another bit of O’Leary scripture – “Do we carry rich people on our flights? Yes, I flew on one this morning and I’m very rich.”

You could fill a page and then a few more with his bon mots, and mots not so bon, but here is just one more from his back pages: “If drink sales are falling off, we get the pilots to engineer a bit of turbulence. That usually spikes sales.”

Not a comforting thought as we are setting off on a very long flight on Sunday, but luckily Ryanair doesn’t go that far. Anyway, we’ve been advised to skip the alcohol and the coffee, so the hours will be stretched.

Mostly these days O’Leary keeps his hand over his mouth, but the prospect of Brexit buggering up his budget airline has seen him remove that hand – not to unleash the full Irish vernacular, but to make a reasonable point in a colourful manner.

The Ryanair boss is worried that Brexit uncertainty could hit his business, as airline schedules and flight bookings are arranged nearly a year in advance. He says that Ryanair needs to be sure of its legal position by this time next year to start selling flights for March 2019, when Brexit begins (that’s if it ever begins or indeed ever ends, and there’s the Brexit Paradox for you).

The colourful part came when he criticised Mrs Maybe on Sky News, saying: “I fail to see what she’s doing in Japan for three days at the moment, why’s she not in Brussels or in Frankfurt or in Paris, which is where these negotiations need to take place.”

He added that Theresa May had just come back from three weeks’ holiday in the Swiss Alps and that she needed to be sorting out Brexit, “not swanning around Japan drinking tea and sake”.

O’Leary has a point here. Mrs Maybe swanned around Japan in the hope of drumming up post-Brexit business – but that can’t begin until Brexit has been sorted out. Why didn’t she forsake the sake and help to sort out Brexit first? Because swanning about is easier and probably more fun, and conjures a cake-and-eat-it illusion that everything will be crumbly and delicious once we leave Europe and instead go knocking on doors around the globe, like door-to-door salesmen in poor suits and with shifting smiles.

But I have preparations to make, two days’ work left to do, and other work to do for when I return, so that’s your lot for now. I plan to take my laptop ledge with me and will report in from Australia occasionally.