"Have you ever, ever felt like this?"

I’ve started to sing an old 1990s TV theme tune - one that could be said to send people Round the Twist - as the lighthouse appears ahead of us, a great phallic alabaster tusk against the sky.

“Felt like what?” says my daughter. I make a note to check my kids’ hands for extra sets of fingernails; a sure sign they’re turning into mermaid people. Round the Twist was a deeply weird show, despite being allegedly for children.

Viv is seven. Too young for 1990s TV silliness. She is in one of the opulent second-row bucket seats of our luxurious CX-90 Azami. My son, nine, is twiddling his thumbs on his Switch console behind her, thanks to USB-C charge points all the way to the third row. I can’t see their fingers.

“Never mind,” I say. “Hey, watch out for Mr Gribble.”

“Who?” she says.

“The greedy real-estate agent. Always scheming.”

I can hear her eyes roll back. “Okay Dad.”

Let's Twist Again: The Lure of a Midweek Lighthouse Stay

I have always loved lighthouses. So I jumped at the chance for a family stay at one, even though it was midweek, and my kids are too young to remember the TV show. And my wife couldn’t come, because it was midweek, and because she’d wasted her youth by doing stuff instead of watching telly.

Round the Twist was a beloved pop-culture phenomenon, spanning 52 episodes across four seasons. It ran over an entire decade. It starred the Twist family, who lived in a haunted lighthouse, where they dealt with all manner of surreal but typically comedic events in often touching ways: lint monsters, cloning machines, bonkers cabbage babies, curses that made you end every sentence with the phrase “… without my pants” (try it, you’ll love the results almost as much as your children will).

I’ve pulled the kids out of class to come along. The boy is happy. The girl… er, less so.

My timing has robbed her of the chance to audition for her school talent quest. I’d felt relieved; her planned ‘performance’ involved singing Imagine Dragons’ ‘Believer’ to a backing tape while her best friend danced (read: did endless cartwheels). I’d pictured them doing this in front of the whole assembly. She felt aggrieved. Her confidence is terrifyingly sweet, and her love is a million-Watt bulb.

“Look, Dad!” says Viv, rolling down the window. “Lighthouse! LIGHTHOUSE!”

Blinded by the Light: Inside the CX-90 Azami Cabin

It’s hard not to gush about the CX-90. Particularly that cabin, which can mollify even frustrated Australian Idol entrants.

It’s a masterpiece. A spectacularly swish example of just how refined Japanese coachwork can be, its inlaid panels of blonde maple subtly resonating with the hanging-stitch kakenui needlework across a wide textile dash. The sense of calm and deliberateness. The effortless integrated tech. Build your own CX-90. 

The Mazda had surged up the motorway like a submarine, a kind of sealed chamber of sophisticated bling. 

A Beacon Since 1903: Arriving at Norah Head

We’d greeted Norah Head [Norah Head / Central Coast travel info], a beacon to mariners since 1903, riding effortlessly on the turbo 3.3-litre inline six’s 254kW of mild-hybrid grunt., and stashed our gear in the old assistant lighthouse keeper’s quarters. A high-ceilinged three-bedroom house, it might have been lifted from Sydney’s most moneyed inner-city city suburbs, only here your neighbours are whales and seabirds and, I suppose, transient lighthouse aficionados.

The lighthouse cottages have a minimum two-night stay [Norah Head Lighthouse cottages], but our photographer, Thomas, had rebuffed the chance to arrive a day early to make himself at home. “Alone???” he’d texted me. “Are you crazy? All lighthouses are haunted.”

I hope he’s right. The one in Round The Twist sure was.

High Light: Climbing Norah Head Lighthouse

We trek 96 internal steps to take us up to the light. We are 27.5m (90ft) above the headland, and we are in love. Specifically with lighthouses.

A composition of 700 individual prisms, Norah Head’s massive art deco Eye Of Sauron lens is astonishing; more so when you see that the electric bulb at its centre is the size of your thumb. This refractive array once allowed the original light source, a kerosene-powered lantern, to shine up to 18 nautical miles (33km). Incredibly, it’s now more than twice as bright.

Like our CX-90 Azami’s Adaptive Front Lighting System (AFS) while cornering, the beam moves independently, lighting the way for intrepid travellers. The lighthouse has only been fully automated and ‘demanned’ since 1994 (is there a less-romantic term than that?); the Mazda’s headlamps have never required a round-the-clock trio of attendants.

The children are in awe. Their laughter chimes down the serpentine staircase and clangs off its four cookie-cutter circular landings.

Kids are slippery. Always doing things before they’re supposed to: growing bigger, riding bikes, entering talent shows, then immediately getting jobs and driving cars and getting married – married! – and all that even though literally anyone (you) can see they’re clearly still tiny babies.

Which is fine. Perfect, actually. But you can slow it all down a bit by preserving them in the fast-setting amber of memory, like a Jurassic mosquito. What we’re doing, really, is trying to crystallise a moments or two, as accessible as the earworm of an old ABC TV jingle.

“I think this is more fun than a talent quest,” I say. “Yes,” Viv agrees. “Unless we won.”

A Sense of Place: A Coastal Night and the Drive Home

We bed down for the evening beneath thick white sheets, the kids and I spread between beds in a towering master suite. Thomas further along the hallway, century-old timbers creaking around him in the cool salt night, camera close to hand. Alert to ghosts.

No luck.

In the morning he photographs the siblings as they scour the lighthouse-adjacent rockpools for mermaid sightings and ambergris and the restless bones of buried sailors. They find crabs and brave-kid rock jumps and even a small hissing blowhole. We tried.

More than 12 decades after it opened, with the bustling town at its feel, the lighthouse at our back feels lonely and grand and eternal. And yet our CX-90 suits the vibe alongside it. Gleaming in Artisan Red Metallic, each curve just so; two sparkling pieces of classic,  fit-for-purpose design.

We finish up with a surf and head back to the freeway, cosseted by the Takumi package’s Azami leather. We’re full of tall tales, which are memories with training wheels on. Paul Jennings might approve.

Children’s writing isn’t held aloft like adult literature. Jennings is a surrealist comic genius, but never mentioned alongside our Wintons and Whites and Careys and Brooks. Yet he still knows how to inject wonder into little lives.

There’s an interview on SBS TV’s YouTube channel for The Feed, where – asked about awards – the author relates an anecdote about a little girl in a burns unit.

“She’d been badly burned,” he said, “and she sat there every day in pain and not smiling or laughing or interacting with the other children, and her father sat there with her every day, holding her hand.” At this, Jennings’ voice starts to wobble a bit.

“And the teacher said, ‘I read your story to the ward, and this little girl laughed, and her father cried.’ And I thought, ‘My God. Bugger the awards.’”

You can’t beat memories. If you’re after some new ones of your own, I recommend a midweek Round The Twist-themed roadtrip to a lighthouse, or anywhere at all. But maybe check your timing with the school first.  

Ready to start making memories of your own? Book a test drive in the Mazda CX-90 and find your nearest dealer.