Confessions of a dog addict

I’ve never gone mushy at the sight of babies, but with dogs, it’s a different matter. If I see a puppy in the street, I can barely keep my hands off it.

When we were away from home for seven weeks, I honestly missed having a dog more than I missed my kids. Of course I love my kids a hundred times more than my dog, but I can communicate with them whenever I want to. Life without a dog, however, has a hollow, empty feel. I miss her welcome, I miss her zest for life, I miss the doggy smell of her and her warm little body in my arms.

When we were travelling there was the constant excitement and stimulation of being in a new place, so I didn’t exactly pine for Fifi, our Jack Russell. Nonetheless, wherever we went, in the UK and Europe, I found myself drawn to any canines in the vicinity, like an almost-reformed nicotine addict to cigarette smoke.

When I am at home and she is away, it’s worse. I find myself staring hungrily at dogs I see in yards and in the park. A mate and I met in our local café last week and my heart leapt as I saw two dogs in the back courtyard. ‘We’ll go where the dogs are thanks,’ I said to the waitress, and proceeded to get my dose of doggy company while pretending to pay attention to my friend.

Because for the last fortnight Fifi has been back with the country cousins she stayed with while we were away: kelpie-crosses Neville and Nutmeg, along with their owners, our daughter Tess and her partner Will. They loved having her so much they asked if they could borrow her for a little top up and we were happy to oblige.

Fifi is happier on the farm in North-East Victoria than anywhere else on earth. In Melbourne she is confined to a medium sized back yard, with owners often at work, circumscribed walks on a leash in a city park and a diet of dried dog food. In Beechworth, she has the run of a massive, complicated paddock complete with dam festooned with ducks to chase, two dogs to play with all day long and raw rabbit, freshly shot for her dinner. She becomes a pup again, swimming laps of the dam in a futile attempt to catch the ducks, racing through blackberries flushing out rabbits and possums, revelling in the plethora of enticing country smells.

Plus, she has fallen in love. Will is a tall, understated guy, strong, quiet and utterly capable. As you’d expect from a dog with a name like Fifi (a name we didn’t chose), she is the opposite - petite and girly. She is also a bit of a princess, and can be a grumpy old lady to boot, but she and Will have become besotted with each other.

As it happened, we have been having some work done on our house, with tradies coming and going, and not having a dog was convenient this fortnight. But we’ve just returned from an idyllic weekend in Beechworth to retrieve her, during which we spent hours on their verandah, just watching the dogs and laughing at their antics. Their personalities are so distinctive and their interactions as intriguing as a well-written play. It’s every bit as entertaining as watching a batch of toddlers, with none of the anxiety. Sure beats television.

So now we have her back. And despite the need to walk her at the end of a long day at work, her slightly neurotic, irritating yipping to be let in, and the carting around of small plastic bags to pick up her poo, despite feeling mean for tearing her away from her new beau, our household feels complete again.

Why I love being in my fifties

Allow me to let you in on a secret that seems to escape a lot of members of our youth-obsessed culture – being middle-aged is a heap more fun than being young.

Granted, I am speaking from my own experience. Granted, too, that I have been fortunate. Clean water, clean air, food on the table, freedom of speech and all those things that half the world doesn’t have. Add to that a husband who still lights me up after all these years and who seems happy to stick around, and an abundance of affectionate kids. And health – which I hope I never ever take for granted.

So, given that I am a 53-year-old who has so far escaped some of life’s most painful disasters, I maintain that everything is one hundred per cent better than it was in my teens, twenties, thirties and forties. You young ones – stop dreading middle age. It’s fabulous.

What’s so good about it? Where do I start? Maybe with happiness. There is so much baggage to sort when you are growing up. So many insecurities. By the time you are fifty, if you have put some hard work into addressing your issues, you start to reap the benefits. As a younger woman I suffered quite badly from depression; these days I wake in the morning and feel a deep surge of gratitude for simple contentment, for freedom from the blackness which blighted so many of my days in years gone by.

Ditto with relationships. If you are lucky enough to have a half way decent partner, things can only get better. You are kinder to them, you are gentler on yourself. I look back at some of the conflicts my husband and I have dealt with over the years, not to mention the exhaustion we have endured and I feel as if we are now in a safe, calm harbour, one in which there is a lot of laughter.

Exhaustion brings me to babies, toddlers and teenagers. Wonderful creatures and I would not give up many minutes of their earlier years, but by golly I am glad they are all grown up now. I am no longer responsible for them. I love their company; they seem to like mine. They bring delightful partners into the family and do things that I never would have anticipated. They are just themselves – so different from each other and from their parents, but with that basic family bond intact. In my fifties, I feel I have the relationship with my husband, children and family of origin that I always wanted. Other relationships are easier too – I am less defensive and competitive with long-standing friends, more open to new relationships with people I wouldn’t have expected to click with as a younger woman.

Health. Okay, so there have been more tests and accidents and trips to hospital in the last three years than ever before. But, just as you reap the benefits of the hard work you have put into your kids all these years, you also realise why you have kept fit and lived sensibly. It pays off.

Many people in their fifties have worked out what they love doing and have become better at doing it. They may be lucky enough to be recognised, appreciated, maybe even paid for it.

Speaking of pay – there’s another thing that is easier now. For many years of my adult life, as we fed and sheltered six people on one not especially princely salary, there was no money in the bank at the end of each fortnight. It didn’t seem to matter much; I’ve never yearned for big bucks and I’m not interested in acquiring ‘stuff’. But now that we do have a bit more, I revel in being able to go out for a meal more than once a year, have coffees several times a week, buy new socks when I need to and be able to offer to shout friends and kids to things without feeling resentful or panic stricken.

Maybe the nicest thing I’ve found about being in my fifties is that I no longer feel that I have to set everybody right, bring them round to my way of looking at the world. For a natural born control freak, this is incredibly liberating. In fact I have been known to say that the secret to happiness is to stop trying to control everything.

Basically, as you get older, all the important stuff – namely relationships and creativity – get better. And you realise the rest doesn’t matter much.

Back in The Age with a faith column Sunday morning

 I still possess one of the advent calendars we had as kids. It’s remarkably well preserved, 50 years on, a testament to the reverence with which we treated such things. Although the same two calendars were recycled every year, I still remember the thrill of opening the little doors and the guilty longing to sneak a peak at the 24^th.

There were no chocolates secreted in the calendars; the pictures were of the Christian story of Jesus birth and what led up to it, so we were reminded of the stories every morning. And we learnt to wait.

In the church season of Advent, starting on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, waiting is the operative word.

Older people know by experience that the most important things can’t be hurried. Growing a baby or a garden, knitting a jumper, writing a symphony, nurturing a friendship that will last through anything, developing trust between traditional enemies, starting a grassroots movement, building a healthy marriage.

In Advent, Christians wait with expectation for the birth of the one they believe was somehow God in utterly human form. But this is not all we wait for.

In Advent, part of the deal is waiting for what has historically been known as the second coming of Christ. This has a whole lot of colourful mythology associated with it; what it means to this 21^st century Christian and many others is something we call the coming of the Kingdom or the Reign of God.

This is a time when we believe that God will bring all things to some sort of culmination. That injustice will be righted, that, to quote the Bible, ‘God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.’

This might sound real pie in the sky stuff, what Marx called the opiate of the masses. For followers of Jesus, however, believing this is no substitute for acting to try and bring about justice and mercy in the world, to increase the pool of love around them, drawing on the infinite resources of the God of love. Christians are called to pray and to work for the end of warfare and violence and pollution - all the time knowing that we may never fully achieve this - and longing for a time when the big love that is God will bring us all home.

One of the creeds of the earliest Christians was ‘Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again’. In Advent, we prepare to celebrate God becoming human. We wait and pray for the time when all will be set right and that in the meantime, to quote St Francis of Assisi, God might make us instruments of God’s peace.

Anglesea to Addis

I wouldn’t mind a dollar for every time I’ve walked from Anglesea to Point Addis. Or from Point Addis to Anglesea. Or both in one hit.

No doubt I covered the distance in my mother’s arms as a nine-month-old baby, during my first visit to Australia - a visit commemorated for me by a rare baby photo of a chubby tot being held by my smiling Granny outside the door of our beach house which is aptly named ‘The Hut’.

The first time I actually remember doing the Addis walk I was five, at the end of 1964, which was also the year I learned to swim in the deeper pools of the Anglesea River. Mum and my sister and I were accompanied by assorted aunts uncles and cousins, who holidayed there together every year. With us we took all the paraphernalia of what we still then quaintly called a ‘chop picnic’.

The gang of us walked the five miles from home to the Anglesea River and further east along the magnificent beaches to Point Addis with its soft sand that is so hard to wade through and its steeply shelving beach where you’d be crazy to swim, but there's usually a fisherman or two with their long poles stuck in the sand, watching and waiting.

Once we arrived, someone planted a sizeable stick at the water’s edge and we set a little fire and cooked our chops. There may have been sandwiches as well, probably a thermos of tea.

The grown ups kept an eye on that stick to see when the tide was starting to turn. Because there is a trick to the Addis walk; the point closest to Anglesea is the only one that is completely cut off at high tide. You have to be careful with your timing; if you get caught on those beaches with their magnificent but steeply inaccessible cliffs, you’re sunk, no pun intended.

I sometimes wonder if tides are higher almost half a century on, as it’s rarely easy to get there and back these days. When in doubt, we use the path on the top of the cliff, which is gorgeous in a completely different way.

It seems remarkable now that my family would head off, five-year-old in tow, for a sixteen kilometre round trip. Maybe that’s when I developed my passion for walking. I have a clear recollection of the endless beach ahead and my weary little legs. As mum told it, I was dragging my feet, refusing to go any further and skinny Uncle George was looking anxious, wondering if he would have to carry me all the way home, when my sister had the brilliant idea of appealing to my imagination. She recreated a vivid scene from the Mary Grant Bruce Billabong books that she adored, and I happily mustered cattle all the way back to the Hut.

I recall our oldest in a backpack on her dad’s shoulders when we mistimed an Addis Walk and had to backtrack and take a slightly scary cliff scramble. Later, when we had a troop of four, we would coax them all the way with the reward of a minty at each of the three rocky points between Anglesea and Addis. Then their dad would jog home and get the car.

These days, with our all but empty nest, Alistair and I tag team it; he jogs one way and the dog and I meet him the other end with the car and walk back. Occasionally, if I am preoccupied with some anxiety or other, I have to remind myself to look around and be amazed anew at the majesty of the views. Every year some more of the cliff has broken off and crumbled to the beach below; last week I saw there had been a major landslide which had brought with it grass which was growing happily on the wet sand, something I had never seen there before.

Each time I’m there, I marvel that six generations of women in my family have walked that route. Great-grandmother Elizabeth Heyer, an immigrant from Alsace, grand-mother Clara Heyer then Paton, mum Frances Paton then Boyd, my sister and I and our daughters, and the next generation too, as all my cousins have grand-daughters themselves.

Mum is buried at Bellbrae cemetery, not far from Anglesea, even closer to Addis. Maybe when I die, I’ll get my kids to scatter some of my ashes on the bush block that surrounds the Hut and the rest on the beaches between Addis and Anglesea.

Cup Day - blog anniversary

Melbourne Cup Day is an anniversary of sorts for me:  exactly two years since I started blogging. Which makes me sad and frustrated, because, despite my best efforts, including stooping to facebook, my basic audience has barely increased. 

But it makes me happy and satisfied too. This time a year ago, I wrote:

‘A year on, the best thing my blog has done for me is provide a regular deadline. It has forced me to write something most weeks.’ Amen to that. 

My first ever post was about a visit to the Forum to listen to Clare Bowditch. Clare B appeared in the blog again in August 2011, when I wrote about attending her tribute to Eva Cassidy. And, a bit of a theme happening here, in a couple of weeks my daughters and I will go to hear her yet again.

Another local artist I have long admired had a great quote in the weekend mag I was reading yesterday. Helen Garner, in extracts from her diaries has this to say: ‘Someone has published a biography of Muriel Spark… Apparently her letters make no reference whatever to current events. So?’ 

Thank you Helen. My blog could be accused of the very same thing. I do think about current events a lot. Right now I am sitting on the verandah of my family shack at Anglesea and it’s warm but not too hot and my feet are bare and I’m in my favourite, raggedy soft old dress; my little dog is sitting beside me, quietly panting as she shifts into the shade. I tap away on my dinky little computer that I don’t have to share with anyone else, and I’ve just had a perfectly good cup of tea and I think about the people in America who have lost everything in Hurricane Sandy, and about asylum seekers, and Pacific Islands disappearing under the rising seas and the seeming pure self-interest and short-sightedness of our politicians. 

I seldom write about such things, however, because I have nothing helpful to say. I’m peculiarly dense about politics; anything analytical is completely beyond me. I know what makes me angry (narrow-mindedness, fundamentalism, entitlement) but can no more muster coherent arguments against such things than fly to the moon.

As a writer, mine is a very domestic canvas, because people and relationships and observed, small details are what I know about. So I am relieved to hear someone as august as Helen Garner saying that’s okay.

Cup Day always seems to come as an extra treat, an undeserved blessing. A mini-holiday before the plethora of public holidays around Christmas and New Year that mean you can have a fortnight off simply by taking a few days of annual leave. It’s the warm up, or maybe the cool down, for summer.

This year it feels more underserved than ever in my case, as I’m only recently back from seven weeks of leave, and although work has been busy and our social life slightly nuts, it hardly merits four days off.

I’m at the beach by myself this time; my husband has to work in New Zealand and the kids are elsewhere. I haven’t had so much time by myself in ages, and I fill it doing some of my favourite things – not talking, walking many kilometres along beach and bush tracks and reading detective stories. It’s almost warm enough for a swim – maybe tomorrow. I sleep longer than usual at night and get up after a long lie in. I nap after lunch. I do a bit of tidying up around the house but mostly I am utterly lazy. In the evenings I cook exactly what I want and gaze into the fire. I connect to my kids on the phone and look forward to my husband coming home on Wednesday. 

I read the weekend papers from cover to cover – every trashy bit of them and I send out thoughts to the thousands of people I read about in dire situations. I fail, once again, to write about current events. I think about blogging and if it’s worth the effort and I decide that, for the moment at least, it is.