It seemed a good time to pop back to Sydney. The Ruddites and their pestilence have finally been put to the sword. Tony Abbott has overcome the setback of my mentoring him as a newspaper intern, and become Prime Minister.
And Barry O'Farrell, the NSW Premier, has lost so much weight he can no longer be called Fatty O'Barrell. Well, not to his face. I'd been in Sydney earlier in the year, when it was so hot the Mosman shopkeepers put out dog bowls for the suburb's panting pooches.
That visit was to walk my stepdaughter down the aisle at what was the mother of all big fat Greek weddings. Once a show skater, now a business woman, she took her vows and became Astrid Anastasi, a moniker so glitzy it seems stolen from Hello! magazine.
If she'd married her bright young man sooner, that name was worth three points from the judges whenever she stepped on to the ice.
I have several photos to choose from for the mantelpiece. The best shows a half presentable Kiwi in a dinner suit, with the pretty bride on his arm.
But there's another, sneaked eight hours later, (damn these paparazzi!), where an ouzo-soaked oick with a hanky knotted round his head, attempts the Zorba dance. Beware of Greeks bearing bouzoukis.
It's now spring, but the mercury has already hit 30 on several afternoons, and the bushfire brigades are busy.
I lived a chunk of my adult life in Sydney, so returning means visiting the past. The past is never finished with us. It's at its worst when we go back to old haunts where it sits, like a parrot, on our shoulder.
The moment we move away from any town we lived in, the place changes. Suddenly, it is no longer ''ours.''
It becomes ''theirs.''
We are dispossessed. In Sydney, I feel this most in the CBD where fresh-faced business people hurry to meetings in the same tall towers I hurried to. They seem a different race.
This sense of lost ownership is soothed only if travelling with someone who is a stranger to your town and needs showing around. Then for a moment, it becomes yours again.
Sydney's a stunner - she's like a Miss Universe finalist wearing follow-me-home heels. You see her at her brazen beautiful best when riding a night ferry into Circular Quay, the Harbour Bridge lights sparkling on one side, the Opera House sails silhouetted on the other.
Sydney dresses up in spreading parklands, and her heels click invitingly along their beautiful walks. Ice cream boats lavish luxuries on the hedonists sunbathing in her scores of sandy bays.
And it's run by ratbags. For 200 years part of the political modus operandi was wads of corrupt cash delivered in brown paper bags. But the stakes have been upped. Some of the shysters in on the joke during the last NSW Labour government got coal mines.
For several of my Sydney years I flirted with the experience of wealth. It was not ridiculous wealth, but sufficient to be offensive. I recommend wealth, but lest you think it easy, you should know sacrifice is involved - hardships like better booze, agonising how much to tip the waiter, and the burden of believing yourself cleverer than the rest.
Some might mention hard work and taking risks, but we shouldn't glamourise.
One year when the Gods were doing their annual rounds, I got noticed.
''A Lapsley?'' asked one, checking the Book of Fate.
''But they shouldn't be listed under S for Silvertails. Lapsleys are found in R for Riff-raff, or at best, P for Plonkers. If they can spell, they might be wharfies, but otherwise its parsons, admen, and writers. This bloke's trespassing.''
''So do we turn him into a pillar of salt? Or grind him to dust?''''Have a heart. Just give him a haircut, a clip under the ear, and send him home.''
Mainly, I've been fortunate, but I'm not one of those who claim they jolly their way through life with no regrets. I worry for people whose memories don't store regrets. There's something gone wrong with their C drive.
John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
