Its not the size of your wallet

Subject: It's not the size of your wallet.

The weather is dreadful and rightly it's pointed out that the coastline in Australia, particularly the Queensland coastline, dotted with bleach white high rise buildings clustered towards a beach from where one can hear and be enchanted by the rhythmic roar of the surf pounding onto the beach. Why on earth the refrain goes, would we want to live in rain soaked Blighty.
Catching the early morning wintery rays of a sun, just emerging from its visit to that other world, not the heat bath that Brisbane receives but the gentle  wispy warming breeze which, zephyr like can turn on its head and bring a gale at the drop of a hat.
The weather in the UK (I must use the term whilst I can) often brings four seasons in a day and locally the taciturn response is to ignore what the weather is doing since it won't last and will soon turn to something else, hopefully more pleasant.  Our beaches are not flooded with a sunlight which soon gets oppressive but instead is like an old fashioned monochrome print with the shadows giving depth to the field of vision highlighting a lack of constancy on what we see making for a far more interesting landscape. The twisted logs and the flotsam thrown up from last nights storm are a far more interesting explorative beach space than the uniformity of mile upon mile of  pristine sand. It's like the comparison between Dubai and Whitby. The one modern and for most of us unaffordable, a plaything for the rich and famous,

Whitby on the other hand is organic, a place of and for ordinary folk to wander around its quaint streets and shops full of bric-brac,  not Gucci a St Lauren but silly hats and sticks of rock.
This chaotic intemperate landscape has bred a benign population in which two of the first words a child learns in "please and thank you". The habit of excusing yourself when someone bumps into you as if it were your fault tests the assumption that we are not individuals living separately but social animals who need to respect each other.
This respect is evident all around but manifests itself in the way most of us drive cars. The car the individualists fetish, the badge we wear to announce how well we have done in life meets a sort of Damoclean conversion when on the street, in the traffic as we signal to others to go ahead or quietly acknowledge the difficulties if someone has got in the wrong lane and needs space in yours. There are many countries in which its citizens would contest their bit of road with the fervour of Dunkirk but not the Pom, here we gracefully acknowledge our need to cohabit.
It's this ability to largely avoid confrontation which makes us squirm when we see someone being overly demanding, be it in a shop or in a hotel. We automatically take the other persons side and filter in a whole raft of reasons why the service had caused such an uproar. The very word "service" is an anathema to many of us and usually makes us poor employees when asked to fit the role of waitress or shop assistant. We feel on a par with those around us easily able to carry the social conversation by being respectful but not subservient.
So when people contrast the Sunshine Coast with Swansea Bay, behind the lack of  Sunshine and cream lies a quality of independent bloody mindedness which asks simply to be judged on the way I respect and judge you, not the size of your wallet.