When it’s all bad in a bag
JANE BOWRON
Iwas in the supermarket checkout line when a small dog’s face, probably of the chihuahua variety, peered out at me from the corner of a handbag.
Of late, dog-loving friends have been trying to persuade me to get a small dog and when I saw this tiny dog’s face, it reminded me of why it will never happen.
The lady owner of the dog was a tattered throwback to the days when Nicky Watson and her ilk were the It Girls of Auckland.
She had long, coiled tresses that tumbled down her back and wore faded tight jeans that rode her hip line with a tramp stamp peeking out above the builders’ crack line.
To her credit there was no bulging muffin top, and as she bent over to pick her card out of her wallet with long square Frenchnude talons, her two inches of naked stomach revealed the mandatory pierced tummy button.
We all get stuck in time warps and hold on for grim life to that era when we imagined we were at our best, and this woman was a prime example of that vanity.
She looked to be a little too long in the tooth to have caught the whale tail wave but had comprehensively climbed on board anyway and stayed loyal to it, well past its ewes-by date.
Still, I felt like congratulating her for remaining so faithful to a look that nasty women, like my bad self, would describe as tragic, but many men would still think was a bit of all right.
The dog was the last bit of her accessory and looked bad tempered, as you would if you had to live a portion of your life in the unsavoury and cramped real estate of a woman’s handbag.
Ladies’ reticules are notorious disease carriers, unhygienic dumping grounds for grubby loose coins, used tissues, and stumps of lipsticks that should only be used to scrawl post-coital messages on mirrors, rather than smear over lips.
I followed her out to the car park, our two vehicles, as it turned out, parked quite close. I watched her grimace and give the insides of her handbag a quick wipe before dumping a tissue with dog poo on the ground and driving off. Yuk.
Iwas relating the story to a friend who regularly cleans up rubbish from his local park, where he finds swags of plastic bags full of dog poo that have been slung into bushes.
His flat looks over the park where he often sees dog owners walking their dogs, virtuously clutching a plastic bag in their hands. When their canine defecates, they pick up the poo in the plastic bag and tie a knot in it.
Rather than walking with the bag till they find a rubbish bin to put it into, they have a quick look round to make sure no one is watching before swinging the warm poo bag and tossing it into the bushes.
It would be far better, my friend says, to have let the dog defecate and leave it on the path than put poo into a plastic bag where the chances of the faecal matter biodegrading are zilch.
Such are the unintended consequences of parcelling up dog poo, we reflected.
We were sitting up in the back garden on a windless day that had actually been sunny and hot and produced a rare bead of sweat. The peace was suddenly disturbed by the cacophony of an artillery of lawn mowers and weed eaters.
Together they worked in harness attacking the rental lawns of the property next door. The noise was cause for much eye rolling and complaint, the dissing of summer lawns quite breaking the spell.
Needs must though. The crew were only doing their job and it can’t be a very pleasant one having to lug heavy lawn mowers up steep Wellington paths and steps.
That very morning, I myself had been doing a spot of weed eating, probably breaking someone else’s spell, when a twig had bounced up and hit me in the eye. No harm done, but glasses will be worn next time.
I didn’t envy anyone having to perform the task all day long. Apparently, my pal whose pal mows lawns for a living, said that the No 1 peril of the job was dried dog poo. When you mow over dried dog poo, the deposit breaks up and clouds of tiny particles of it rise up into the nostrils and into the eyes. Another yuk.
We had run out of milk and I shuffled down to the dairy to get another bottle. I came back and while we were waiting for the teat to draw, I smelt something bad and looked down to see dog poo attached to the sole of my shoe.
I had a theme going, it was dog poo, and I was sticking to it.