The House Sit

We arrived back at my sister’s house after our week away in the Blue Mountains, tired, but happy… two delighted dogs greeted us at the door, and after we unpacked, we headed out for our regular walk around the park, in a place that now felt like home. 

When we got back in Ellie called me into the bathroom, ‘you know those spiders I was talking to you about?’ ‘That’s one of them right there!’ A very large menacing looking beast lurked in the top corner of the bathroom wall…no-one was going to sit comfortably on the toilet while that was there…

Ellie calmly went and found a glass and paper and efficiently deposited our first huntsman spider back in the garden – ‘she’ll be back’, she said, and shut the door.

The next morning i got up early and went out to see what nature there was close to Ellie‘s house. In the days after we had arrived I had hardly noticed that there were hills covered in trees in Wyoming, and within 10 minutes I had found ‘the bush’… on my map it looked like quite a large area of forest. 

Climbing steeply from the edge of the housing estate I hiked up, the trees were beautiful and the dappled shade already a relief at 7.30 in the morning. As I walked, the steady rise and fall of the cicada’s song was getting louder and as the sun got higher so did the volume – eventually the noise was so intense I walked along with my hands covering my ears, grateful when I saw houses again. 

Back home I plonked myself down on the couch, and my sister pointed at my foot…

‘Leeches’, she cried. ‘I’ll get the salt.’ ‘Theo, Theo, come and see this…’. 

She waited until Theo had arrived before she poured salt on the three leeches attached to my foot… it was so ‘sister’ the way she waited for Theo to get a good look before getting the blood suckers off of me!

I am still amazed at how calm I stayed to be honest… I didn’t scream hysterically (like one of my other travelling companions did every time he encountered one of them in the next few weeks. 🙂

I guess the main reason was that I hadn’t noticed them… They’d clearly been there since I’d walked through the forest, and I’d been completely oblivious. They didn’t hurt, they were just gross black slugs attached to my foot… Sucking my blood. 

Eeuww GET THEM OFF ME!

Turns out they are a part of every day life in rural Australia, but with a little sprinkle of salt they are gone. I later learned the ‘scrape and flick’ technique which I preferred because it meant you didn’t need to carry salt every time you entered the bush, and you didn’t need to kill them… 

My foot bled for half an hour that morning – the bite of a leech insures a good outpouring, they numb the area and put an anti-coagulant in apparently…after I’d soaked through two plasters we were finally done with my first ‘leech attack.’

We were due to go round to visit our new house sit that morning, but clearly not until I had stopped bleeding everywhere.

My sister has a small house and two dogs …and three extra people was fine for a couple of weeks but not fine for nearly three months so Ellie and I had agreed Rosa would stay with her and have her own room and we would be a bit more free ranging. Ellie had been searching online for a house sit somewhere close by in the weeks leading up to our arrival and found one literally five minutes drive away. The house sit post had said there was a hot tub and a pool, as well as a number of lovely animals to look after… It sounded fabulous.

My sister had gone round to meet the family a few days before we arrived, and her text to me had been guarded… ‘well, you won’t be intimidated by how spotlessly clean everything is…’  ‘and if you like the smell of dog I reckon you’ll be fine…’

As we drove up the drive a barking that surely wasn’t made by two or three dogs started up, how many were there?! Jade answered the door, she and her boyfriend had been looking after the place over Christmas. She looked sympathetic as we walked into the kitchen and were instantly mobbed by five large dogs….the smell wasn’t so much ‘overwhelming’ as ‘all pervasive’. 

The difference between knowing that’s something is a bit messy and encountering a house where every surface has more things on it than there is space for, where the chance of something falling off every time you brushed past was close to 50% and the likelihood of knowing what was precious amongst all the ‘stuff’ was impossible …I could see my sister was anxiously looking on, wondering if her sister and brother-in-law were able for this chaos.

Jade started with the Lizard, ‘Trevor needs feeding a table spoon of dog food every two days and his water checking every day’ – ‘don’t let the dogs in his room and he’ll be fine’ (okay that didn’t sound hard) ‘Scrappy (the goat) needs hay throwing over his fence every day and don’t try making friends with him’ – ‘he will head butt you really hard.’ (…also pretty easy).

‘Don’t let the chickens out of their run and make sure you collect the eggs and feed them scraps every day and the dogs will try and get in but they can’t go in…they will eat the chickens’ (…okay).

‘Don’t let any of the birds out of their enclosures’ – ‘they have automatic feeders which shouldn’t need topping up but you need to check their water and feed them fruit occasionally’ –  ‘Macca the cockatoo will talk to you sometimes – Suzanne takes him out into the house but you can’t – and if he makes a noise like a car alarm going off don’t worry!’ (Car alarm…don’t worry).

She picked up a long pole with a net on the end ‘you need to collect the leaves out of the pool every day and…’

The pool did look nice – I put my hand in the water and it was a lovely temperature. 

‘…but Nelson can’t go into the house.’ 

Crap I’d missed stuff about the dogs. 

’Why can’t Nelson go into the house, and which one is he again?’

‘He’s the bigger black poodle and he wees absolutely everywhere.’ She rubbed his ears aftectionately and carried on.

‘They chew everything so don’t let them in any of the bedrooms and don’t leave anything on the floor’ – she showed us one of her sandals and the remains of the TV remote control…

Leaving nothing on the floor when every surface already had four or five layers of stuff on it was going to be like playing a daily game of giant Jenga – life was not going to be dull…

‘There are five dogs and two of them can’t go in the house because they wee everywhere’ Jade was making sure we got the point about the wee. ‘Three of them come to bed with you and sleep in your room but don’t worry, they don’t get on the bed, they have their own beds, they are just used to the company.’ (…three dogs, bedroom).

She showed us some additional things about the house and gave us a couple of keys. ‘We will be gone early tomorrow morning so get here when you like…you’ll be fine!’

Would we though…?

We arrived just before lunch to a back yard that looked like a tornado had been through and ripped apart all the dog cushions, the frayed end of one of the house pipes dangling from the wall, and there was already enough poo to build a small mountain…it turns out five large dogs can generate an awful lot of poo. 

We cleaned surfaces, swept floors and scraped up poo – the dogs capering and wagging around us…they really were happy to have us around.

Back in the house our first big logistical issue was where to put our rucksacks? We couldn’t just unpack in the bedroom because the ‘chewing brigade’ would have a field day, and there was literally nowhere we could put anything anyway. We went for a little search and found a smaller bedroom where we could unpack onto the bed – good enough! 

We went for an explore and found a room entirely dedicated to musical instruments with a piano, drum kit, seven electrical guitars, a couple of basses and two huge amps. It was an absolute treasure trove… The living room was a hoarders paradise, every surface covered in trinkets and layers of dust, and in one corner of that living room was a tabletop Pacman machine. 

So much fun…we all loved that machine, and that’s what it was like living there.

If you ignored the clutter and the mess there was loads of fun to be had. The pool was fab and the hot tub was glorious. The dogs were the heart of the home though – they were so good natured and although Nelson weed for Australia in the last Olympics, it’s amazing how quickly you can fall in love – Mandy was the retriever puppy, desperate for love, Daisy, her mum, quick, determined and obstinate as hell. Oprah, the matriarch poodle, easy and sensible, and Peaches, the crazy white one who bounded around madly…we really did love them all within a few hours of arriving and their good nature and general willingness to do what we asked MOST of the time made us consider giving a home to a rescue dog at some point in the future. They showed us that the people who loved them had them at the centre of their world …and whilst it may have been chaotic, it was a house full of love. 

…Love and lack of sleep 🙂

We lived there for nine days in the end, and it felt like an experience entirely and completely on its own. Coming back to the dogs each day we went out, their welcome always so warm and a bit bonkers.

…but nights were hard. We were nearly shoved out of the bed most nights by at least one of the three dogs, whichever one had decided it was their turn to sleep on the bed…and some nights they joined forces…

I thought having a newborn baby was the most sleep deprived I could get, but two large retrievers and a big poodle top that… When I wasn’t being licked, I was being tail flicked, kicked or farted on and I was woken up at least ten times a night… ‘Can’t quite get comfortable – just move over a bit will you human…’

I blearily remembered Jade telling me that that it was no hassle having the dogs in the bedroom ‘they don’t get on the bed, they just want the company…’ Utter rubbish…they wanted the bed, as much of it as they could get and they were way better at getting their own way than we were.

When we opened the door to the bedroom there was a race to get the best spot…I learned by the second day to clean my teeth and get into my night things before I let them in, and on the third night I was in the bed doing a starfish before Theo let them in.

Nothing worked, they just shuffled their bums and scratched, licked and tail wagged until they had us both on the edges of the bed.

It was only when we finally gave up and conceded defeat that we got a good nights sleep – we gave up trying to get them off the bed and cuddled up…probably the right way to go from day one but there you are – lesson learned.

It was a great place to live in the end. We had a room made perfectly for us to practice music in because, amazingly, we had been asked to play a gig at the Narara Eco Village.

When Theo looked at who we knew in Australia, who he could connect with through activist networks, he contacted John Seed, one of the founders of Deep Ecology work with Joanna Macey and Arnie Ness, and Kev and Lowanna Doye, who had cycled to Australia 25 years before (cycled! – It took a year and a half…!!)

We knew Kev and Lowy lived about six hours up the coast from Ellie but where was John based?

A fifteen minute walk from our house sit!

In a country that is 32 times bigger that the UK this has to be close to being ‘miraculous’. 

On our second day at the dog house we walked over to see him and made plans. He took us to the dam that was at the back end of the eco village (which will have between 350 and 400 homes by the time its finished).

It was pretty obvious within seconds of meeting him that John Seed was the ‘Wizard of Oz’ – we would need to get his advice on finding our courage, brain and heart at some point in the next few months!

He showed us the venue (the Narara eco village hall) and I asked him if the village had a choir that might like to perform with us at the gig? 

Turns out they did have a fledgling choir and that they would love to sing with us. It became the model for all our gigs in Australia – we hadn’t planned on doing any but ended up doing five with choirs supporting four of them and Rosa, Grace and Lucy doing harmony backing vocals in the other one!

Each gig was utterly different, and reflecting back I am delighted we did every one of them – connecting with campaigns and campaigners across a small part of Australia (an area that would have encompassed most of the UK but didn’t even get out of one of Australia’s states…)

It was good for Theo and I to remember what it was like to just sing together, and the choirs we encountered were so full of life and willingness to sing out…but the highlight of the whole experience was family.

Turns out Mike and Thoma are both great at guitar (and Mike can sing as well but we only really learned that at the end) …Rosa knows all the words to every song and when Thoma said he would play with us if Rosa did she said yes to spite him (cousin dynamics are so cool) and for one fabulous gig, at the Rising Tide Camp, Lucy and Grace sang with us as well. Rosa, Grace and Lucy belting out the choruses of five of our songs, Thoma and Mike lifting the tunes with parts they learned rehearsing in that fabulous room at the House Sit.

I had not even thought about playing music when we left England and here we were in the heart of our family with the audience leaping to their feet to give us a standing ovation by the end of the last song..FAB-U-LOUS! 

We got to meet some wonderful musicians and some very brave people who stepped right out of their comfort zones to play with us (and some people who stepped right into theirs 🙂

We couldn’t have done any of what we did without John, Kev, Julian, Brenda, Mike, Thoma, Rosa and Cath… thank you for all that you do…(and did for us!)

On the first Saturday of that nine days Ellie, Michelle and I went to Sydney to the SCG – the Sydney Cricket Ground – to watch the fourth day of the Australia Pakistan test match. I so wanted to visit one of the iconic cricket grounds in Oz, Ellie loves cricket and Michelle is probably more into it than me! (Certainly more of on Australia fan than I am…)

It was a really fun day out and I got to watch David Warner’s final innings for Australia (a man all cricket fans love to hate 🙂 – I was glad to see him go but some ancient compassion came over me and I cheered along with everyone else when he walked onto the pitch, was genuinely pleased when he got is 50 (runs) and joined in his standing ovation when he left the field! (I never would have believed I was capable of that before I left England, I am changing…)

We got to go on the pitch at the end of the game as well and I lay on the hallowed turf – clearly this was going to be my highlight of the whole trip (…after the wedding, and meeting Mike and the girls, and taking the dogs for a walk around the park, and meeting Ellie’s friends and playing the gigs…oh alright it wasn’t my highlight – but I did love it 🙂

When I had got back to the house that night we made a plan to meet up again with all the kids in the pool the next day – time to re-read the notes we had received – but that could wait for tomorrow.

The next morning we cleared up the back yard (again) and read Jade’s words of wisdom. ‘Under no circumstances, must you ever leave the dogs in the pool area on their own because they might drown.’ 

Got it!

Peaches loved the water the most – she was desperate to get in but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it, the whole pack raced around whenever we let them in to the area and at some point one would fall in – the other four all knew the way to the shallow end but the first time Mandy the puppy fell in she swam to the side and just butted her head against the side where she was…we rushed over to help and she was bloody heavy to heave out, she would definitely have drowned if we weren’t there so we tried not to let them in too much after that!

We had lovely days going to the beach with Thoma and his dad Louis during those nine days, practicing for the gigs, walking out to swim in the beautiful dam out the back of the eco village and cuddling up with the dogs. We had a family day out in Sydney seeing the Harbour bridge and the Opera House, travelling in on our only Australian train, through stunning inlets and beautiful bush. It was great being proper tourists for the day, eating ice creams in the park and then going for a meal in Chinatown – brought to us by a robot 🙂

We were sad to say goodbye when we finally left; our house of treasure and trash had become a home for us and Peaches, Nelson, Oprah, Mandy and Daisy have a place in our hearts now – thank you for letting us stay in your home and making us feel so welcome and loved…x