Learning how to love another
Adventures alone:
Hitching, pitching tents and dumpster diving: how one woman travelled the world for a year on 1400 bucks.
Tasty travel:
The best South American food and more.
18-19 Croc, shock & roll:
Exploring the rugged but rewarding Gibb River Road.
REGULARS 8 9 10 20-21
Smugshot, Check In Deals, Five Things Kiwi Life, Ask the Expert Puzzles
22-23 Dear Chatty:
A candid convo with funny man Alan Carr.
24-25 Motor in:
Murray Cammick’s exhibition Fast Cars.
30-31 Lennon, loss and never giving up:
Singer-songwriter Helen Henderson’s intriguing story.
REGULARS 26 27 28 35
Film and music reviews Books Appointment Viewing Grant Smithies
Cover:
Solo traveller Petrina Thong kicks her heels up in Kosovo. Petrina Thong
Photo:
It wasn’t love at first sight. As far as affairs go, ours was a slow burner rather than a bunny boiler. It wasn’t like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor canoodling surreptitiously on the set of Cleopatra, or Brad dumping Jen for Angelina.
Unlike Diana and Dodi’s Parisian dalliance, our relationship was neither ill-fated nor ultimately fatal, though it did catch me by surprise.
My paramour had his charms, for sure – a goofy demeanour, an easy nature, a zest for life – but my heart wasn’t his to have.
I’m married with two kids and he’d just lost his life partner. His grief, my pity; what a fine pair we were.
‘‘Let’s go away for the weekend,’’ I said. ‘‘I’ll drive. Hop in.’’ He sat silently in the back, with my children, as I drove the back roads to the Coromandel Peninsula. My husband, who stayed home, was none pleased.
In Tairua, I bribed the kids with lemonade Popsicles as we walked our way into each other’s affections.
He was good company. We trekked around the estuary, along the promenade, across the mudflats to the marina. We collected driftwood, dipped our feet in the surf, shared conversations with strangers and played pass the parcel with fried hoki and chips under a pohutukawa.
On our first night away together, he kipped on the couch in our bach’s lounge. On the second, he slept at my door. Then, in the morning, he climbed into bed beside me, put his head on the pillow, and licked my face eagerly, cementing his transition from farm dog to pampered pet.
At home, my husband was in bed with four sulky cats, for I am, and have always been, a cat person. My oldest, Snuffles, is 84 (in cat years). She’s crotchety, completely deaf, badly groomed, prone to puking up furballs and quite possibly psychotic. Oh, and she also dribbles like a blocked gutter.
I’ve rarely lived in a house without a cat indoors and a farm dog outdoors. It’s the natural order of things. Or at least it was until our arthritic geriatric mutt, Gypsy, one of those embarrassingly needy dogs for whom a hundred pats was always a hundred too few, was euthanised.
I held her paws as the needle went in and her lights went out, robbing our 5-year-old border collie, Doo-Hawg (South Auckland rhyming slang for Hot Dog), of the only friend he had ever had.
What to do? Get another dog? Or open the door and let him in? We sent him off to the dog groomers for a shampoo and cut,then I bought a blue striped hessian bed that matches my Wallace Cotton kitchen apron. I needn’t have bothered.
Every night, that cunning canine waits until we’ve retired before he scoffs the contents of the cat biscuit bowls and snuggles up on the sofa. My husband kicks him off it every morning but he’s no fool. As soon as his cuckold leaves for work, our dog skulks up the stairs and takes his side of the bed.
I’ve fallen for him, hard. It’s those puppy dog eyes, that unquestioning adoration.
But here’s the thing: like someone with a self-diagnosed gluten intolerance, I have discovered that dog ownership evokes a peculiar sense of selfentitlement. I now expect cafes to provide bowls of water for him. I ignore leash-only bylaws. And sometimes, shame on me, I don’t pick up his crap.
We all have our foibles; my dog has a particular weakness for the popular ornamental grass Lomandra longifolia.
He can’t walk past this tough Aussie native without backing up to it and taking a dump, which shouldn’t be an issue except that Lomandra longifolia is also the favoured grass of ThamesCoromandel District Council landscapers, and pulling dog poo from its feathery strands is as easy as extracting chewing gum from long hair.
Meanwhile, Gypsy, who – had she not already popped her clogs – would have died and gone to heaven at the thought of spending even a single night indoors, let alone riding in cars or long weekends at the beach, still sits in a blue storage box at the vet’s.
I really must pick up her ashes. My newly planted ‘black doris’ plum trees could do with a hit of potash.
On our first night away together, he kipped on the couch in our bach's lounge. On the second, he slept at my door.