Karen The Wallaby Lady

I love it when you discover your friends have friends you had absolutely no reason to expect.

Not just “oh they’re nice” friends. I mean the kind of friends who make you stop mid-conversation and think, hang on… how is this person in your life? The ones who quietly expand your understanding of what a human life can even look like.

Tonight I went to see Vicky, with a crumble made from blackberries me and the girls had picked over the weekend.

She had a house full and also one of her oldest friends staying with her from Australia.

Karen.

Karen runs a wallaby sanctuary.

An actual wallaby sanctuary.

Eleven acres of Australian bush, full of injured and orphaned wallabies, that she looks after herself.

And there I was, on an entirely ordinary Sunday evening in Salford, sat next to her eating crumble.

I absolutely love things like this.

Because somewhere on the other side of the world, while I’ve been home educating my girls, washing clothes and wondering what to make for tea, this lady has been feeding wallabies — and before that, kangaroos and fruit bats.

Fruit bats!

Her place now works almost like a little homestead. Backpackers come and stay and work for four hours a day helping with the sanctuary — feeding animals, cleaning, fixing whatever needs fixing — and then the rest of the day is theirs.

I was borderline giddy.

I quizzed her. And every time she talked about the animals, her whole face changed.

You know that thing that happens when someone starts talking about the thing they genuinely love?

They become more themselves.

She pulled out her tablet and suddenly I was scrolling through photographs of wallabies, fruit bats, backpackers and this extraordinary life happening thousands of miles away.

And I just kept thinking:

How cool are some people?

Really.

There are people quietly living these completely remarkable lives all over the place, and most of the time we have absolutely no idea they exist.

Then occasionally one of them turns up at your friend’s house.

I think that might be one of my favourite things about knowing people for a long time.

You think you know the shape of their world, and then they introduce you to someone who has been living in the Australian bush rescuing wallabies for years.

And suddenly their world gets bigger.

So does yours.

I went round to Vicky’s with a blackberry and apple crumble.

I came home having met Karen the  Wallaby lady.

What a brilliant thing to be able to say about a Sunday night.