It was a leisurely Friday afternoon in the staffroom months ago. We were all gathered around the photocopier, waiting for the arrival of a competent person to remove the paper jam. The then not-yet-retired Head Teacher Bob was telling us about a gorgeous red sports car he sighted the other day in the street.

"I was admiring it from across the street when I saw another man also looking at it and standing right beside it. It was bloody Paul Keating! (Australian Prime Minister of the Labor Party, voted out in 1996) I almost cried out loud, ‘go away you old hag, don’t spoil my view!’"

"Well, I went to a stage show with my husband the other day, " I continued, feeling rather excited about all the celebrity talk, "and I saw a short old man standing in a queue at the counter to buy drinks during the interval. I thought he looked rather familiar, then I realised he was Bob Hawk! (another Labor Prime Minister before Keating) He looked rather lonely, because nobody was even looking at him, apart from me, of course."

“Well, I was shopping with my niece and her daughter Emily at Bondi Junction the other day,” said Jenny, who could hardly wait for me to finish to make her contribution to the celebrity talk, “Emily was sitting in her stroller eating her blue ice-cream, and she started talking to a little boy next to her who was also sitting in a stroller eating a green ice-cream. Emily said, ‘my colour is prettier than yours’, and so the two were comparing their ice-creams. Then the boy’s father asked my niece, ‘how old is your daughter?’. My niece said ‘three’, then the father said, ‘gee this girl can talk!’, and then they moved on. I said to my niece, ‘this man sounds familiar. Have we met him before?’ And my niece said, ‘That’s Russel Crowe!’”

At that moment a diligent student put his head in the door looking for his teacher to hand in his research assignment which was a week late. So we broke up and went back to work, just to set the student a good example.

On the weekend the next day Hubby and I went for a relaxing cappucino at a local cafe/bookshop – one of those new trendy places where they sell both coffee and books. I was telling Hubby all the celebrity sightings I heard about the previous day when I looked up and recognised the bloke working at the coffee machine behind the counter. “Hey, look,” I alerted him with a nudge, “isn’t that Glen McGrath, the Cricket Star who was playing on telly last night?”

“Yep,” Hubby replied without even looking up, “He owns this place. The coffee’s alright – nothing’s wrong with it, but the service is lousy.”