But then, in the latter part of 2000 Sandalford, one of the West's oldest wine producers, launched a cruise of its own. With structured on-board tastings, a guided tour of the company's state-of-the-art operations and a three-course lunch of regional produce under the vines, this said more about the valley's evolution as a wine tourism destination than any glossy tourist brochure ever could.

Truth is, Australia's most urban wine growing region (it lies a 25-minute drive from the centre of Perth ­ less on a Sunday) is fast becoming one of its most urbane.

Those in the know are comparing this quiet metamorphosis with what happened in Margaret River a decade or so ago, and with some justification. All the signs are there; an influx of young, innovative winemakers (Rob Marshall, Larry Cherubino and Steve Murfit all come to mind), a marked increase in good places to eat and stay and ­ most significantly, perhaps ­ a honing down of varietal style and, with it, an added finesse to Swan Valley wines.

Not that it's all stainless steel tanks and spot-the-wine-wanker quite yet. Of the 35 or so vineyards scattered over the fertile alluvial flats west of the Darling Range escarpment, most are still owned by descendants of the Yugoslavian and Italian emigrees who settled there during Australia's open-door immigration policy immediately after World War Two.

Which means that, while Swan Valley chenin blanc, verdelho and cabernet ­ all of which thrive in the region's unerringly hot, dry summers ­ are up there with the best in the West, you can still stop off for a flagon of something entirely quaffable if mood and budget dictates. (Extract ends.)

Over the last decade or so, tourism has been something of an epiphany for the Great Southern community - hardly surprising, given the wealth and diversity of natural beauty on tap here: massive forests, peroxide blonde beaches and the majestic Southern Ocean itself; a cliché of azure shimmer dotted with small islands.

On the back of wine-making has come the other accountrements of a region made good: an abundance of amazingly fine, fresh produce (think furry little raspberries, greenly pungent olive oils); great cafes (itıs not fine dining heaven just yet) and enough luxury accommodation to keep the most committed hedonist happy.

Wine-wise, cool-climate goodies include pinot noir, which grows full-flavoured and true to Burgundian style. Riesling, particularly from Frankland River and Porongurup, excels, while Great Southern Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc - are out there winning national and international accolades.

I well remember the first time I tasted a Great Southern wine. It was a raspingly hot Summer's day at Frankland Estate in Frankland River, the largest and most northerly of the sub-regions.

Co-owner Barry Smith was out in a dusty paddock doing something useful with sheep. Luckily, for I hadn't made an appointment, he saw my car, followed me back to the winery shed and graciously opened a bottle or two.

The Isolation Ridge Riesling knocked me sideways. One of four single-vineyard rieslings made here, it's grown at the edge of a fog band stretching inland from the ocean. There were hints of spice, lime, nectarine.

The Olmo's Reward, which winemaker Judi Cullam likes to call her "New World St Emilion", was lean, sinewy and earthily intense. Gosh. I even liked the Viognier. (Extract ends.)

Under the expert tutelage of floor manager and all-round guardian angel Sharon, I learn the basics of being a waiter. This includes a vernacular particular to the restaurant scene. "Order up", for instance, tells the kitchen there's a new order waiting to be filled. "Table two away" indicates a table is ready for its next course. And what was that one the staff invented specially for me at the end of the night, Shaz? Oh yeah - "don't give up your day job."

Seriously, though, I did pretty well considering my innate disinclination towards subservience. At 7.30pm, the first of my three tables arrives and I take a deep breath, walk over and smile nicely. "Hello," I say. "My name is Jane. Perhaps youıd like something to nibble on while you're looking at the menu...?" And then I'm off and running and there's no time to think about anything except taking orders, explaining the specials ("How does a fresh truffle smell, madame? Well, rather mousey,if you ask me...") and refilling water glasses.

At the end of the evening, my new colleagues congratulate me on a job well done and it seems altogether unnecessary to divulge a few of my minor faux pas.How, for instance, table 13 ended up eating natural oysters with dessert spoons because I forgot to dole out the little forks.

And how, when things got really busy, I reverted to maternal type and congratulated one bemused diner on his nice, clean plate.

Or how I got a bit carried away with the whole wine pouring thing, gave one bottle an exuberant swirl and ended up with my left breast perched on the shoulder of a lady at table 11. That one in particular will take some forgetting.

Several friends have since asked whether, in light of my experience, I would consider a career in waiting. Yes, I told them, just as long as the hours were short, the pay high and I didn't have to spend too long on my feet.

Or perhaps I might put it another way. A web search for sites including both the words 'waiter' and 'veins' garnered over four thousand listings.

I rest my case. (Extract ends.)

Itıs immutable: All of us will suffer loss at some time in our lives, not just as a result of death, but through divorce, the incapacitation of a loved one or, simply, getting older in a world which deifies youth.

And with loss, inevitably, comes grief.

At its most fundamental, grief is a human response to change, yet we live in a society which struggles to accept it as a normal process. Learning how grief works - and, by implication, how the better to deal with our own and othersı grief - surely lies at the very heart of our humanity.

Libby Lloyd places one splayed hand over her face. 'This is how grief feels,' she tells me. 'Sometimes for months, sometimes for years. It is quite literally in your face. A constant presence between you and the rest of the world.' Libby heads up the Social Work Department at the Women's and Children's Health Service (WCHS), which encompasses King Edward Memorial and Princess Margaret hospitals and offers those who have lost babies before, during or soon after childbirth 'to put their skin back on, put the boundaries back in place.'

Ultimately, though, grief is a lonely process.

'The first thing you have to realise is that we canıt take away their grief, we can't make it better,' Libby tells me. 'But we can offer a safety net while they go through the process; a safe, caring and informative environment which acknowledges and honours their experience.'

After the death of a loved one, most people are in a state shock. 'It's the human bodyıs way of coping,² says Bernadine Brierty, manager of Bowra OıDea funeral directors. Given most funerals are arranged within 24 hours of the death, most of Bernadine's clients are still coming to terms with their loss when they come to see her.

'I often see them a weeks after the funeral and they always thank me for ensuring everything went smoothly, she says. 'But many add they don't really remember much about the funeral itself, that they were on auto-pilot.'

Libby confirms this reaction is entirely normal. 'Grieving, regardless of the reason, is a perfectly natural process. Weıre hard-wired to do it.' After the initial shock comes reality, and with it intense pain. 'When it comes, it is stunning,' says Anne Finkbeiner in After the Death of a Child (The Free Press) 'Your chest feels crushed...I remember feeling pinned like a butterfly, or somehow eviscerated.'

What not many people realise is that it's the frequency more than the strength of emotion which reduces over time. 'Even years later, people report strong pain at remembering,' says Libby Lloyd. 'But they say that the pain is much less frequent, much less invasive as time goes by.' (Extract ends.)

Sweet and Sour were each no bigger than a pork chop the day we brought them back from the piggery. Despite our own steadfast refusal to become emotionally attached to them Junine, a house guest that first Summer of our Discontent, succumbed big time. Mornings would find her in the pig pen sitting alongside Sour, scratching away at his back with a wire brush.

Junine was away the day we took the pigs to the abattoir and on her return seemed accepting of her friend's fate. Until, that is, the fateful night I cooked barbecued pork belly strips and Junine found herself munching on one of Sour's soy-soused nipples.

After things died down a bit, we thought it unwise to mention that Sour's head was actually still in the freezer waiting for me to make it into brawn. Eventually, his look of silent accusation and the thought of Junine going in search of frozen peas and ending up in the local institition were too much and we threw the idea of brawn - along with Sour's head - away.

That was the year I scored the trifecta. Giving the flock its annual inoculations, I managed to inject a syringe of sheep vaccine into my knee. It hurt like hell and, even pre-AIDS epidemic, I was freaked by the potential health risk of sharing a needle, albeit with a sheep.

The best bit? Eating a rather good dinner in hospital (seafood pancakes, apple crumble), the worst? Worrying that I'd wake in the morning to all the symptoms of Black Udder. (Extract ends.)

With its jukebox and pool table, Langtrees has the air of a suburban saloon bar. There are framed photographs of sporting heroes on its walls, a large television in one corner, an oil painting of high profile owner Maryanne Kenworthy near the front desk.

Caroline is studying psychology at UWA. "I'll only do sex work for a couple more years," she tells me over a game of pool. "It's a great way of making money fast." (For the record, Caroline and her colleagues consider the term 'prostitute' old-fashioned and reject it because of its secondary connotation of worthlessness.)

Veronique works night shift as a nurse and the extra money she earns at the brothel will, she tells me, buy her a nice house in a few years' time.

Like all the women I meet, Veronique is extremely frank about sex. With no boyfriend, the only place she's getting any right now is at the brothel and, she tells me happily, she's making the most it. "I can go out to a nightclub and find myself a bloke or I can come here. The difference is here I get paid." There is, I point out, one fundamental difference. Isn't having someone select her - someone who may not be her cup of tea, coitally speaking, a bit of an - ahem - challenge? "Not really. I just concentrate on something I do like about them - the curve of his neck, nice neat fingernails. There's nearly always something."

And when there isn't?

Veronique laughs.

"I lie there and think about the money, dear."

The brothel's tinted glass doors slide open and a man walks in. He chats briefly to the day receptionist and is shepherded through to the waiting women. Ten minutes later - a period characterised as much by the women's animated, friendly conversation as his evident awkwardness - the man is back at the front desk with Caroline in tow. While he pays, she gathers the mandatory three clean towels and a sheet from behind the desk and, linking arms with her new companion, they head off in the direction of the bedrooms.

During the day, an hour with Caroline or her colleagues costs $250. Each session includes a shower, a brief check for STIs (sexually transmissable infections), a body massage, oral stimulation and the sexual act itself.

All of which must happen with indecent haste if you've booked in for the brothel's daytime minimum of $130 for 20 minutes.

Who, then, could blame the odd fellow for rushing the hygiene side of things a little? Veronique confirms that sometimes an eager client will jump in and out of the shower rather too quickly.

And?

"And I just tell him to get back in and use the bloody soap this time."(Extract ends.)

In an exclusive gentleman's club just up the road from London's Harvey Nicholls, the Knightsbridge department store made famous by Abfab's Patsy, lies another leitmotif of the upwardly mobile - Montes restaurant, the occasional lair of television superchef Jamie Oliver.

Occasional because Montes is but one of Oliver's many business interests. Yet even in absentia there's no missing the celebrity connection. Menus, specials-of-the-day cards - even the restaurant's street-level front window - feature Oliver's image.

"He's certainly tuned into all the Œ'look at me' publicity stuff", confirms my waiter over a plate of black truffles with fresh tagliolini. "He's a real professional, visiting all the tables, doing his 'ello my darlin' bit. The guests lap it up." You bet their Bombe Alaska they do. It's no coincidence that a magazine poll in the US saw celebrity chef Julia Child rank alongside Hilary Clinton and Janet Reno as one of the country's 25 most influential women. Nor that, closer to home, Channel 7's "Surprise Chef", starring local lad Aristos Papandroulakis, regularly draws over 1.6 million viewers an episode. Over the last decade, celebrity chefs have become hot property. They appear at book launches. They win awards. Heck, sometimes they even cook.

And while celebrity chefs have been with us since the 60s - pioneered by the likes of UK-based Fanny Craddock, Aussie Graham "Galloping Gourmet" Kerr and, in the US, food guru Julia Child - what has changed is the sheer clout, in bums-on-seats terms, of the food-as-entertainment-industry.

Over the last decade, a new breed of culinary wunderkind has staked claim to our mass media, going way beyond the "this is one I prepared earlier" thing.

Jamie Oliver in particular marked a major shift in the way cook shows are treated by mainstream media, says UK media analyst Sara Maclean.

"Oliver was the first young chef ever to garner really big viewer numbers. He could pull the sort of huge audience you might expect for, say, a David Attenborough special but not, until relatively recently, a cooking show".

But even Maclean was surprised at just how big the whole cooking-on-television thing got. What really brought it home for her was when that doyen of British food shows, Delia Smith, featured in a TV campaign for British supermarket chain giant Sainsburys.

"Within days of the ads going to air, stores around the country were reporting they'd sold out of the ingredients she used on-screen.".(Extract ends.)

An oyster is a fish built like a nut - Anon.

In Wiltons of London, a haunt of the late Princess Di, I ate flat, green-tinged French native oysters served with wedges of lemon wrapped in muslin to stop the pips.

Across the world on the Manly Foreshore, I devoured yet another indigenous oyster, this one a plump, creamy Sydney rock, along with 11 of its mates and a passing bottle of crisp Canberra riesling.

But best of all were the uniquely West Australian-grown oysters I downed with greedy relish on a recent visit to Albany. The Western, or Albany, rock has an intense minerality and length of flavour borne of a lifetime spent in the clean, cool waters of the Southern Ocean. It is, in my humble opinion, the finest oyster available in Western Australia.

Oysters are like little vacuum cleaners and spend their lives sucking in water, digesting all the edible stuff and spitting it out again. One of the most interesting aspects of this crusty little bivalve mollusc is its capacity to change from male to female. No-one really knows what makes an oyster change sex, except that it has something to do with keeping numbers of each gender in balance and that an oyster which has spawned as a female can often turn around and become a male. This repeated transexuality is called 'serial hermaphroditism'.

Carbon dating of shell remains found in vast coastal middens (mounds) along the Australian coastline prove that indigenous Australians were enjoying native oysters since at least 6000 BC. Captain Cook recorded seeing native oyster beds in Botany Bay on his voyage to Australia in 1770.

Disappointingly, most of these native oyster beds have been dredged into near extinction by early settlers, who not only ate their quarry but used the shells - and sometimes the flesh, too - for making lime.

But small pockets of native oysters DO live on. The Sydney rock is one such beast, as is the angasi oyster (Ostrea angasi), variously referred to as a 'Œmud', 'flat' or 'belon' - the latter after a related variety of flat mud oyster found in France (Ostrea edulis).

The giant pearl oyster Pinctata maxima has long been caught (and, these days, farmed) off the beaches of Broome and the North West, its pearl meat sold as a delicacy throughout Asia. (Pearl meat is the small, sweet, chewy translucent adductor muscle found in all oysters, except that in good old pinctata m., it's huge. Last time I was in Broome, a local supplier was selling the meat, frozen, for $100 per kilogram.)

In the early days of the Australian oyster industry, farmers set up leases in areas where native oysters hung out, providing the spawn with somewhere to attach themselves. Over the years, the role of home has been filled by rocks, sticks (hardwoods like blackbutt and blue gum were favourites because of their resistance to the attack of borers and other marine nasties) and ropes - anywhere, in fact, that a spawn could call home and grow into an oyster. These days, hatcheries are often used to process spawn, although many of the old-style oyster farms are still in operation.

Three main types of oyster are farmed in Australian waters. The Sydney rock (Saccostrea glomerata) is farmed in estuaries, bays and rivers throughout New South Wales and, to a much lesser extent, in southern Queensland.

Then there's our very own Western or Albany rock oyster. Similar to a Sydney rock oyster but of a different population, Western rocks are grown at the only oyster farm in Western Australia - Ocean Foods International, at Emu Point, Albany.

The company has also had a go at growing angasi oysters, but found the process commercially unviable. But the mighty angasi is staging a bit of a commercial comeback and is being bred at small farms along the east coast of Tasmania and in New South Wales.

Most excitingly of all is the work of Frenchman Zac Launay, an acquacultural scientist from Brittany, home of the belon. Launay has established a mussel lease in Denmark and, by this November, hopes to have started farming native angai oysters from spat he has collected in the region. Angasis mature much more quickly than rocks or pacifics, so that Launay's first projeny should be ready for consumption here in around 18 months.

The oyster most often consumed in Western (and indeed throughout) Australia is the Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas), a largish, reliably juicy specimen which is available almost all year round. Originally imported into Australia from Japan in the 1940s, versions of the Pacific are now farmed extensively in Tasmania and South Australia.

The Pacific is a hardy little beast which breeds at the drop of a hat and, cuckoo-like, supplants other oysters when given half the chance. This readiness to see off the competition has seen Pacific oyster farming banned in all areas of New South Wales except Port Stephens. Extract ends.

The house was empty, kind of.

The men were half-way through their bubblewrap ministrations; were coming back the next day to put everything in trucks.

And so we sat, my dad and I, him nearly 70, me 42, drinking Spanish sauvignon blanc in a paella cafe on Wandsworth Road with crimson walls and waiters who light your cigarette, listening to a trio and wishing it was us up there in the limelight. Like to shine, my dad and me. Bit of a family thing.

And then we're up there, me and dad just like the old days, singing Quiet Nights and we're not great but we're not half bad and everyone claps and we sink back into our chairs (we're on bottle numero two by now) and already the power is rushing through our veins; to perform, to affect.

And so we sat, my dad and I, him nearly 70, me 42, upon the steps of 109 The Chase Clapham which has been our family's South London home for almost 30 years, half-pissed, singing out to no-one in particular and everyone who'll listen the songs we've sung since I was a teenager, the words of Stevie Wonder and Art Garfunkel and Paul McCartney arcing over the bitumen with the light of the street lamps, echoing off old red brick walls that won't see us again for a long time, perhaps ever. Pouring duty free Cointreau for the small crowd of neighbours which gathers to listen. Or perhaps like us they are there to bear witness.

And so we sat, my dad and I, him nearly 70, me 42, watching the removal men carrying out three decades of our family on their backs and wishing wishing wishing it was over and we could leave or, better still, somehow not have to leave at all. Laughing through our hangovers despite ourselves at the drying slick of duty free Cointreau on the steps.

It is worse for dad but better that we're together. Just my dad and me. Together. Singing like we always did. Saying goodbye.

Movin On. (Extract ends)