G'Day Sappo Fans,

After a restful Chrissie break and a few bludgy weeks to ring in the New Year, it's back to good old-fashioned hard-yakka. We're not the only ones hard at work though, Storm Henk celebrated the New Year with us here in Reading, and the emergency services have been absolutely flat out like a lizard drinking handling the floods. You'd think with all that water hanging about it'd be the perfect time to pull out the tinnies, but even the mightiest of vessels were no match for the flooded Thames, which a quick squiz at the records reveals were the highest ever recorded flows in Reading.

Our antipodean friends have been dealing with similarly dire circumstances. In a daring and unfunded social experiment, a truck driver in northern New South Wales overturned his truck, flooding one of the busiest highways in Australia with hundreds of chooks to answer the age-old question, why did the chicken cross the road? Unfortunately, the silly galah didn't implement any experimental controls or perform any statistical analysis, so the results were a bit crook. Even so, it's expected to be published in the upcoming nature article "On The General Theory of Chicken-Road Dynamics". Onya mate, we love to see citizen scientists getting their fair suck of the sauce bottle.

I expect the SCR will be chockers with the lot of you this arvo. We'll grab some tucker, pop on the billy, and brew up a hot choccy or two to beat the cold weather.

Hooroo,

Robby (The Sappoteers Cultural Advisor)

P.S. There are many Aussie slang words scattered throughout, but one is not real, bonus points for anyone who can spot it.

Dictionary:

G'Day: Hello

Chrissie: Christmas

Bludgy: Low effort, slow

hard-yakka: Hard work

Flat out like a lizard drinking: Busy

Tinnies: Metal boats

Squiz: To look at something

Chooks: Chickens

Silly galah: A foolish person

Crook: Bad

Onya: Well done, good on you

Fair suck of the sauce bottle: Getting a reasonable opportunity to partake in an activity

Chockers: Completely full (short for chock-a-block)

Arvo: Afternoon

Tucker: Food

Billy: A metal teapot, traditionally used with a campfire

Hot Choccy: You know this one

Hooroo: Goodbye

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