Month: August 2020

The yuk factor

‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?’ Maynard Keynes. 

An apt statement in these times when so much changes from one day to the next. I had my first Covid dream the other night and it surprised me, as if the events of our lives are finally percolating through to my unconscious. 

One of our dogs likes to go out into the back garden where she digs up cat shit or fermenting acorns and eats them. She has a delicate gut at the best of times, but these additions to her otherwise staid diet of reduced fat chicken flavoured kibble bruises my sensibilities. 

The culprit

I googled what to do when your dog eats shit and the post tells us to clean up after other animals as best we can and not to make a fuss of it.

If we make a fuss our dogs detect it as a power struggle and become even more interested in eating the forbidden stuff. 

The vet reckons we shouldn’t worry too much. For some reason, most dogs can tolerate eating shit. 

If these ideas are causing you discomfort, I’m not surprised. I find my stomach roiling even in the process of describing the dog in the garden digging up and eating cat shirt. Fermenting acorns are not such a big deal.

I must have been thoroughly indoctrinated as a small child to have a heathy distaste for all things shit related.

Some of the earliest words I remember from my mother: Vies Bah. Dutch for dirty and yuk. These revulsions run deep. I’m sure they serve a survival function, to keep us more concerned hygiene-wise and then less likely to get sick.

I have a similar revulsion though when I read Maynard Keynes’s words, not the stuff about facts changing and changing his mind, but the final address in the question to ‘Sir’. Clearly, he is addressing a man or men.

Whenever I read quotes from the past that speak of mankind, I react.

When I was growing up, I took it all for granted.

Not anymore. These days I want to scream and when I listened to Alexandria Octavio Cortez’s speech a few weeks ago, and her thoughts about her fellow Senator Teho who had verbally abused her on the steps of their government, I was delighted to hear a woman speak so eloquently against a man who had touched her face uninvited and called her a ‘fucking bitch’ on the steps of congress.

I’m tired of abusive language like this. Tired of the slurs and insults that are directed towards women daily, most notably in the way in which women are excluded from the volumes of history.

And later in congress, the speaker referred to Octavio Cortez as ‘gentle woman’ and I thought how quaint, a gentle woman like a gentle man. And how these terms speak to a sense that people can be gentle, whether as men or women, decent as Octavio Cortez argues. 

A decent man is not decent because he has a daughter or a wife. A man is decent because he speaks respectfully to other women and this includes acknowledging their existence.

How does this relate to the dog eating shit in the garden? 

If we can get to the point where sexist comments and the overriding of fifty percent of the population in public discourse like the overriding of people of colour, the overriding of disabled people, of old people or anyone else who is seen to be vulnerable for the simple fact they don’t fit in with the mainstream norm of young, white and male, if these ideas can create an internal response as powerful as our human revulsion to the idea of a dog eating shit, then the world will be a better place. 

As Keynes writes, if the facts change then we can all change our minds. On the other hand, there’s another issue here that relates to notions of fact. What is it? Especially, in this crazy world of conspiracy theories and fake news. Stuff that’s on the rise.

Conspiracy theories are close cousins of denial: I don’t like the truth, so I will tell myself a story to account for the facts that leave them in doubt. That way I don’t have to notice the bus that’s driving towards me. The bus that will run me over, if I don’t pay attention and get out of the way.

You have to deal with uncomfortable facts, not try to turn them into delusions so that your own delusory life can feel better, albeit temporarily. 

Including the horrors of a dog eating the unspeakable. 

Foxes, angels, and a pandemic

There was a message from a neighbour on my phone late last night. She wanted me to know a fox had attacked her tabby in their back garden. 

‘Please spread it round the neighbourhood,’ she said. ‘With the lockdown in place, the foxes are getting bold and hungry.’ She sounded urgent. ‘You might want to keep your cats inside at night.’

What a message, first thing on Sunday morning. 

When I was a young woman during the first few weeks of meeting the man, who was to become my husband, we went one weekend to Mansfield and stayed in a shack on his uncle’s property, Emu Vale.

Shearers occupied the place during the wool clip. Otherwise, it was left empty and open. We were welcome to use it in the offseason.

I did not take my husband-to-be literally when he described the place as a hut. Instead, I imagined something rustic and poky, perhaps with charm. Certainly not the sheep dung filled, dirt floor without beds or wardrobes, without chairs or chest of drawers that it was.

In one room there was the wireframe of what was once a bed with a hole in the middle of the meshing. In the main area, a rough bench made of a carved-out tree trunk and a table covered in bird shit were the only pieces you could describe as furniture. 

My husband-to-be had told me we’d need sleeping bags.

Fair enough, they wouldn’t have blankets, but he said nothing about the absence of mattresses. So, we slept on the floor in front of the fire.

Too late, I realised my mistake in bringing clean clothes, makeup and flared trousers. I needed instead flat shoes and old clothes to match the decor. 

My husband-to-be had spent many months in his childhood at Emu Vale when his mother was in hospital for prolonged periods having her last child.

He knew the place with a childhood certainty, the certainty of small boys who recognise every inch of the land, every hidden gully, every fallen tree, every lone dugout. 

He knew where the foxes hung out and took me out early that first morning. He had a gun and a licence to shoot vermin. We were out to catch rabbits, but he warned me, we might even catch a fox.

The story has passed down the generations. The joke that I made too much noise stepping on twigs as we crept along.

‘Shh,’ my soon-to-be husband said as we tiptoed down a hill. ‘The rabbits will hear us coming.’ He was ahead, stopped and turned towards me. ‘Can’t you do something about those pants?’ He glared  with his shot gun titled skywards. ‘Hold onto them. Stop them squishing.’

There was a line of weather-beaten fox pelts on a barb wire fence nearby. They were grey with the weather, a mark of triumph for the farmer who had shot them and a tragedy for the fox families who’d lost a member. 

The layers of silk material in my flares refused to be silent, despite my best efforts. And I hung back fearful to go on. These were the first cross words my husband-to-be had ever uttered to me.

Not the last, but they stayed. A type of mismatch between his expectations and mine.

On future trips over the next few years, I dressed appropriately and never again saw a fox in Mansfield, though that day walking with my soon-to-be husband, his gun over his shoulder, I caught sight of an orange red flash. At twilight against the setting sun on our way home. 

‘Look over there,’ my against a husband-to-be said. 

At the base of the hill, near a wire fence that separated one enclosure from another, two eyes above the pointy snout and wide tail of a fox, looked up towards us, far enough in the distance to cause the fox no panic.

Almost as soon as it had appeared it was out of sight. 

I do not like to think there is a fox lurking in our back garden at night or that it might attack our cats. There is a good share of possums around. But possums live above the ground and out of reach. They are no substitute for our two elderly, short-sighted and hard of hearing cats.

To think there might be murder and mayhem in my back garden is a sobering thought first thing on a Sunday morning when the rest of the world still sleeps. 

I miss Mansfield. Its green slopes, my sense whenever we visit, that the man whom I married lived here for long periods as a small boy. That his ancestor, Big Red O’Brien from County Cork in Ireland worked on this land, tilled its soil, built a house in the place where Emu Vale now stands.

He fought off the wild blackberries that threatened to take over his vegetable crop if left too long unattended and killed many foxes.  

The sense of my husband’s ancestors, a haunting presence, filled me with quiet awe whenever we camped by the willows on the banks of the Delatite all those years ago when our children were babies and I no longer objected to sleeping rough on the hard ground under flimsy canvas tents. When the crisp cold mornings of the early spring or boiling hot days of summer fed a return to the land that once thrilled me.

The Delatite

 

I am happy now to re-imagine Mansfield, especially during lockdown, when trips to the country are out of the question.


I am not a traveller. I prefer the closeness of home, the certainty of my own bed and pillow, but when I leave home, usually on someone else’s urging or for a conference, or writing event that cannot be enjoyed close to home, I zing with the thrill of adventure like others who love to travel.

It’s an ancestral feel, as if the skies are full of the thick beating wings of all the angel ancestors who came before us to guide us on our journey to new places. To watch over us while we travel into new territories, to applaud us when we succeed and weep heavy tears when we fail.

I have loved this sense of my ancestors; in the same way I loved my guardian angel as a child. The one that stood behind me slightly to my right, behind my shoulder, hovering there and ready to steer me away from danger, or from sin, or from anything else that would have been too much to bear. My guardian angel was like a caring parent who looked after me exclusively in the absence of others. 

While those foxes out there in the world – even as I love them from Roald Dahl’s imagination; even though in my children’s stories, foxes are benign, apart from the one in a red jacket that threatens Jemima Puddle Duck, a sinister fox if ever there was one – those foxes in my back garden need to be flushed out and kept away from our domesticated animals, the ones we have tamed. 

We do not want wildlife in our safe spaces, otherwise heaven help us. Even in the quiet of a Covid lockdown. When the foxes take advantage of our absence on the streets at night. And sneak into our gardens to murder and eat our unsuspecting pets. And not only are our fellow humans at risk, but our protected spaces might go back to how they once were. And not a typical biosphere of native plants and animals but one taken over by those introduced species like foxes who do not belong here. 

Go away, I say to the foxes and to the virus. Go away and leave us alone.