Red Dawn

I was wondering on Tuesday night why it’s so long since I’ve written one of these emails.  It occurred to me that maybe I’ve been here too long.  That nothing is really new anymore, that my ability to see it as a foreigner has waned.  There have been other signs that this is the case.  I’m able to watch the news now without guffawing at how perochial it is; I understand the rules of rugby league;  this winter seemed long and cold.  

I went to bed on Tuesday wondering if I’d ever write another letter.  Maybe nothing remarkable would ever happen again.

I’ve mentioned before how most of the ‘lakes’ in Australia are in fact dry.  On Tuesday evening, just as I was thinking about how unremarkable this country has become, gale force winds picked up some dust from the Lake Eyre basin seven hundred miles west of here in northern South Australia.  (There is no state called Central Australia so the country’s dead red heart is made up of northern South Australia, southern Northern Territory and eastern West Australia.  No wonder we, sorry they, call it The Red Centre.)  Anyway, the dust picked up by the wind was then sucked 2 miles into the sky by an intense low-pressure system.  The phenomenom continued over the next 24 hours until millions of tonnes (think about that, millions of tonnes) of dust and dirt had been pulled up into the air.  

Dust storms are fairly frequent in the Red Centre and many of them blow into the country towns of western New South Wales.  In places like Mildura and Broken Hill it’s not that unusual to bring in your laundry dirtier than it went out (and trust me, the laundry doesn’t always go out clean out there).  But even by Australian standards, Tuesday night’s dust storm was a big one, the biggest in seventy years in fact.  At its peak it was picking up 140,000 tonnes of dirt an hour, was 250 miles wide and a thousand miles long.  That’s a big red Great Britain floating towards Sydney.  And me, with the windows just done.

Funnily enough, there was a strange smell in the air when I woke up on Wednesday morning.  More like plaster dust than anything and I wondered if next door were having some work done.  

‘Jesus’ said Oliver, who rarely says anything before 11am.  ‘Look at the sky’.

‘It’s a bushfire’ I said, knowingly and rolled over to wait for the alarm.  But if that was a bushfire it was bloody close so I opened my eyes again.  The sky was corner-to-corner orange.  Not quite the red you may have seen in the papers (every photo I saw had had a red filter applied), more a burnt sienna, a glowering and dangerous colour on a scale I’d not seen before.  

Looking closer, awake and somewhat nervy now, I could see it wasn’t the sky that was red, it was the air.  As if nitrogen were suddenly visible and not quite how you’d imagined it.  The radio calmed me down, 24-hour news already hyperbolic and asking people to ring in with their dust storm stories.  (‘Hi, this is Brenda from the northern rivers.  I was scared.  I turned on the radio.  Now it’s fine.’)  I turned off the lights and wondered around the apartment, looking at what orange light does to the world.  Now it was just dust it was strangely comforting, like being in a cocoon on Mars.

It didn’t last of course.  The orange light came not from the red of the dust but from how it defracted the dawn light (the same reason sunrise is often a little red, just normally on the horizon).  By the time I left for the airport the world was just a little frosted, as if I faintly pink fog had settled.  I was on my way to Perth for work and felt assured my flight would be on time.

Wrong.  

Maybe Surry Hills got off likely, maybe the three inches of dirt on my taxi should have been a sign.  I sat at the airport for six hours reading about what was going on outside.  A normal day in Sydney sees 20 micrograms of air pollution per cubic metre.  A bad bushfire might generate 500 micrograms.  On Wednesday concentration levels reached 15,400 micrograms.  Visibility at the airport was 400 metres and even when flights could leave, they had to wait for the planes and crew which had been turned away for the previous six hours.

I heard some people complaining about it.  Isn’t it awful, how annoying (see, I can hear whingeing now) and I just wanted to say: no, it’s wonderful!  What an incredible, remarkable country.  Where else would I ever have seen that?  It’s great living abroad.

Cat Wars

I had been planning to write an email about the dust storm but my current situation is a little more tense.  You can never beat correspondence from the battlefront so this is what you’re getting instead.

 We have two cats.  Nip is a ginger streetfighter with saggy bellies from long ago.  The vet thinks it was a botched abortion but Ginger (as she prefers to be known) doesn’t like to talk about it so we tell everyone she’s got short legs.  Tuck is black and was born in captivity.  He’s a timid pussyboy who never grew up and thinks his balls are living happily on a farm in the countryside somewhere.  

Tuck and Ginge arrived at our place in the city within a week of each other, both rescued from death row at the local dog’s home.  Seriously, charity is hardcore over here and the website is clear that Unless This Cat Finds A Home It Will Die.   Tuck’s too stupid to grasp the concept (his best friend is that little black cat in the mirror) but Ginge is pretty grateful.  She knows how tough it is out on the streets and, whilst she misses the fags and booze, she’s more than happy to stay indoors.

Until now.  

Oliver and I have just bought a place up the coast and in our naivety (oh happy, distant days) we thought we’d just take the cats up at the weekends.  Let them explore slowly and get used to the one-hour journey.  And at first everything went much as we thought: Ginge strode out the front and bullied next door’s dog out of his lunch money whilst Tuck hid in the linen cupboard saying ‘there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home’.  Then, after a few weekends, Tuck too started to explore.

He really is too much of a pussy to go anywhere by himself but Ginger gently led him outdoors and showed him the grass and the pavers and the sky.  And then, we don’t know what, but something happened.  

The best way to describe it is to imagine a feline Hannibal Lecter.  The noises coming out of Ginger’s mouth were bizarre, a deep, long growl akin to caterwauling but much more evil than that.  I managed to grab Tuck before she did and threw her into the house and close the patio door behind her.  Have you ever seen a cat throw itself against glass so it can do you harm?  It’s almost as much fun as holding a cat that thinks its life is in danger.  And by the way, those long red scratches aren’t the ones to worry about.  It’s the little red dots where the claw has gone cleanly into your flesh that you really want to avoid.

She attacked him four more times that day (scratches, red dots etc) until timid little Tuck was a quivering and somewhat patchy ball of fluff.  Our Paul, my lovely vet brother-in-law, took a drunken midnight call to offer his advice.  Mine would have been “Don’t call me at midnight when I’m drunk” but he, and subsequent vets, have shed some light on our situation.  

It’s about domination, territory marking, rules changing as environments change.  Your average marriage basically but with regular fights to the death thrown in.  And, just as with trying to save a marriage, there are a number of things we have to try before we give up and give away.  

So now I’m sitting in our living room with Ginger under an upside-down shopping trolley and Tuck barred from running out of the room.  Their mutual cries of fear and imprisonment are breaking my heart. 

And on that last point, if you’re reading this and thinking ‘For goodness sake, it’s just a cat!’ then I in turn am thinking three things about you.  One: you won’t want to hear when we give up on this option and move onto cat family-counselling (three hours, both owners, both cats) or cat prozac.  Two: you don’t have cats.  Or three: you have children, or may one day have children, and you fail to see that even without them the onset of middle-age is beset by pouring your love into ungrateful, heartbreaking and endlessly-expensive little animals.

It’s a wonderful world.