'Come shopping in Dorchester with me today?' my future husband asks. He has to be forgiven, mind, because we've only known each other less than a year. It's 28 degrees in the English countryside and I'm intolerably hot. There will be no scoffs from you, Australians, about the British summer. It's hot, no question. I spent my entire time figuring out how to get to either a swimming hole or the sea, and then complaining because the beach is too full of rocks and the water is icey cold. Going into town is out of the goddamn question. Twenty years ago I was also less compromising, shall we say. Perhaps less diplomatic. In my memory, I told him where to go. Was he bonkers? Why on earth would I want to go shopping?

We were getting married in a week's time and I was in anti-panic mode. I refused to make a fuss in a traditional sense - we'd have a fire and I'd talk my Mum into finger food and I might get my hair done but that was it. I didn't believe that getting married was about material things, just love in the deepest and most powerful declaration of love I could think of. My parents were on the way over from Melbourne and my best friend was arriving too. My sister couldn't afford the trip, which I understood completely. It was a miracle that anyone was coming over for the wedding. I was a long, long way from home. It would have been nice to have my sister there. Although we weren't particularly close in the way some sisters were, we were still family, and we still loved each other. A family event without her didn't seem quite the same.

Poor Jamie tried a few times to get me to go but I was stubbornly rejecting his offer. He said he was going to go anyway, because 'reasons'. Keep the poor lad in mind for what happened next. He was trying his best.

Do also remember that in 2004, not many people had mobile phones, and we certainly didn't Facebook message each other. It was email or a phonecall, and very rarely a phonecall, as it cost a bomb. Thus when I got a reverse charge call from my sister, I was both suprised and slightly annoyed. I accepted, of course, but not without a squeal of 'what on earth are you doing calling me reverse charge??'. Still the penny had not dropped.

She cut me off in a very sisterly, exasperated way. 'Oh can you pick me up from the train station at Moreton?'. Imagine my brain cells. They were working pretty hard at this stage. Moreton was a ten minute drive down the road. Poor little brain cells.

'I told you you should have come into town with me', Jamie laughed, grabbing the keys. She was early by a couple of hours and found her way to the station down the road. That's where he was going, to pick her up. And if I'd just come with him, we would have gone via the station.

All the way from Australia.

My little sister.

And Then...

Six months later, she got married. Of course I couldn't go. How would I afford it, what with my little boy in tow as well, and a husband? Three tickets were a lot of money. I'm so sorry, sis, I had said. She totally understood. The shortest distance by air is 16,903.84 km or over 10,000 miles. It takes around 24 hours. One does not just drop everything and go.

A week before her wedding, my heart raced like anything as I knocked. My parents had gone in already and we had held back, hiding behind the car and giving it a minute or two before we made our approach. My little boy trying not to giggle with excitement. We looked at each other nervously. Surpises can be tough.

We laughed when my brother in law opened the door. He fell against the hallway wall, rendered utterly speechless. Down the hall, my pregnant sister started crying.

'Suprise!'