At what must be the world’s most well-situated lawn bowls club, the ground is stripped to flat squares before the infinite, impossible blue of the Pacific Ocean. From the Clovelly clifftop, the sea itself is geometric: the horizon, a clean faithful line. Just down the hill from here, beyond the rock pools, says Dr Norman Swan, is one of the best swimming spots in Australia.
It has been a cold winter, but today – if you only looked at it – could be mid-summer. The sky is cerulean. And in the early afternoon sun, it is warm, too. It is here that the doctor, broadcaster and – to some – “king of Covid” has come to talk about why the “easy” period of childhood is not so easy at all and why parenting may never have been quite this hard.
