Love at first sight

19th- 23rd December

I’m in love. Head over heels in love. With Sydney. Not a man, you understand; a place. Though it it were a man, he’d be pretty much perfect. Good looking, interesting, relaxed, stylish, a touch romantic, fun to be around, with a city pad and a beach house.

From the moment I flew over the city and saw the tiny sails of the opera house nestling up to the coat hanger bridge, and the boats cruising round the vast expanse of harbour, I was hooked. After six days of this whirlwhind romance, I’m ready to move in.

It all started with dinner on Friday night. We never did find the Vietnamese restaurant recommended by the Rough Guide, but stumbled upon the best fish restaurant in town. Small, but perfectly formed, Fish Face is about the size of your average fish and chip shop, but locals come from miles around to sit around its stainless steel bar, or at one of the four pavement tables, We grabbed the last one available and I scampered across the road to the bottle shop. BYO wine is ubiquitous in Oz, even if the restaurant is licensed – and so much cheaper. (Sydney 1, London 0). My fish (a smooth dory) was the best I’ve ever tasted, and the waiter even gave instructions on how to eat it – start at the thinner end and leave the skin on, as it’s still cooking.

Fish Face is in Darlinghurst which, on a later, daytime wander we discovered was one of Sydney’s hip, arty, gay-friendly areas – no wonder I felt at home! I loved the tiny terraced houses, dating from the early 1900s and still with their decorative ironwork balconies. We also found another great restaurant there for brunch - this time we went looking for it. I’d been given Bill’s cookbook a couple of years ago, and love the simple recipe style. The restaurant itself is just as good and incredibly popular – there were queues on the street for a table at 11.30 in the morning. No nouvelle cuisine portions here – the ricotta pancakes with yogurt, honey and bananas kept me going through a marathon walk round town until dinner that evening.

Getting round Sydney is easy. The central area is compact enough to walk round, there are hundreds of buses to take you further afield, an underground service with double-decker trains and, of course, an excellent ferry service. People run for the last ferry out of Circular Quay just as they do for the last train out of Waterloo – but it seems more glamorous here. Could this be London in a parallel universe? Many of the names are familiar, but they’ve been thrown into the air and landed in a different place. Liverpool Street runs across the top of Hyde Park and turns right into Oxford Street. Paddington sits between the Surry Hills and Kings Cross - which then runs into the wonderfully named Woolloomooloo, and you know you’re back in Australia. And you don’t see huge flying foxes in the skies over London. There are said to be 22,000 roosting in the Botanical Gardens alone. In daylight hours they hang from every branch within view, wrapping their leathery wings around them like cloaks. There are now so many that they are damaging the trees – 18 dead so far - and the park authorities are petitioning to relocate them. Not sure how successful this will be. Do bats have homing instincts?

We choose a relatively cloudy day for our grand walk round town, admiring the bats and the buildings. Apart from the Opera House there is no truly stunning modern architecture, but Sydney has its fair share of Victoriana and Art Deco in spades. When the sun shines, the harbour draws you like a magnet, so where else would be we go on a blue-skied Saturday morning? We take pictures of the harbour bridge and the opera house from every angle and look round the Rocks market before hopping on the Manly Ferry – better, and cheaper than the Captain Cook harbour cruise, though I do feel sorry for the bloke promoting them dressed up in a white wig and 18th century sea captain’s uniform. The ferry, which offers even more bridge/opera house photo opportunities, is packed with people carrying surf boards heading for Manly Beach, a short walk through a shopping centre devoted to board shorts and bikinis. It’s the Saturday before Christmas but there's no sign of stressed-out shoppers battling for last minute presents, turkeys or brussell sprouts. Allow myself a smug smile. (Sydney 2, London 0)

As we walk along the beach and round the headland to Shelly Bay, I wonder if this is what England would be like if we had better weather. So much of Australia, and Sydney in particular, is culturally similar to the UK – not surprising as a high proportion of the population has British roots – but despite dubious media claims that they work longer hours than Europeans, there’s a more relaxed pace of life here. Drivers even stick to the speed limit, and only tourists from London jaywalk!

While novice surfers try to stay on their boards on Manly Beach and we watch a helicopter hovering overhead – is it on shark alert? - a flotilla of kayaks assembles in the sheltered waters of Shelly Bay. Then they’re off. We watch them paddle out and expect them to round a buoy and come back. But they keep on paddling until they disappear over the horizon. We never see them or the helicopter again. But we do find yet another culinary oasis for lunch and, with a glass of chilled wine in hand, watch the comings and goings on the beach. Bliss.

Back at Circular Quay we take a walk round the Opera House, trying to work out how to get inside. No intuitive wayposting here! Eventually find the box office, but everything pre-Christmas is booked up. But it’s a great incentive to come back to Sydney to see a performance there. We console ourselves with sundowners at the Opera Terrace Bar – along with half of Sydney. It’s a total melting point – people in shorts and t-shirts sit next to others in full evening dress, and everyone’s having a good time. We do eventually see another sold-out show in Sydney – the newly released Avatar movie in IMAX 3D. Not quite the cultural event I had in mind, but great fun all the same.

On the ferry back from Manly we watch a skywriter at work; C-A-L-L M-U-M. The initial letters are dispersing by the time the final M is formed, but we all get the message. Was it for one of the surfer dudes or a marketing ploy for the local phone company? A few days later we see another skywriting display at Bondi Beach, advertising their New Year’s Eve extravaganza. Ok, we didn’t quite celebrate Christmas Day with a BBQ at Bondi, but two days before is almost the same! We stretched out on the beach – not a deckchair in sight, the Ozzies just put a towel down – and listen to the gay boys chit-chatting all around us, before braving the bracing sea. It may be a glorious blue, but it’s the same temperature as the English coast in summer. But you can get the bus there from the centre of Sydney. (Sydney 3, London 0).

It’s our last full day in Sydney. After a morning on the beach, we have lunch at the legendary Icebergs Club – home of Bondi’s winter swimming club and a 50m saltwater pool into which the waves regularly crash during our summer lunch. Must be truly spectacular in winter. Then walk round the coastal path to Bronte beach taking in two smaller, but equally surfable beaches on the way, and bus back to town with the teenage surfers.

We splash out on our final meal at the wonderful Sydney Café on the top floor of the Old Customs House at Circular Quay, which has a fantastic view of the harbour bridge. We work our way through the cocktail list while waiting for a table, so no hardship there. And the wait is definitely worthwhile – both for the sublime food and the view. Throughout our stay, I’ve been fascinated by the bridge walkers – in exchange for around $300 you can walk up the curved metal arch to the top of the bridge. No doubt they get a great view of the city, but the distant grey figures marching up and down in groups of all day and most of the night, remind me of a chain gang. At 10pm they are still trudging up to have their photo taken with a bunch of strangers. As the last group disappears, the bridge stages a little light show – I looks like a series of Christmas baubles hanging down; but it could be linked to the New Year’s Eve fireworks. We’ll be long gone by then – but you never know, I could be back to see them another year.