Dogs are from Mars, Cats are from Venus

There are dog people and cat people. And then, there are people who behave just a bit like dogs and cats.

I always joke that I am part cat; I share a cat's liking for my own company, I prefer peace and quiet to parties, elegance and order to chaos, and the opportunity to have a thorough bath/shower every day and feel well-groomed. I have a regrettable sense of schadenfreude that any cat would appreciate, and my night vision isn't bad either. There are times when I don't want to be touched; if I had a tail it would swish with annoyance then. I am a cat person.

That being said, I also own a dog whom I love dearly - I have had both cats and dogs in my home since childhood. But I relate better to cats than dogs when all is said and done.

My husband G on the other hand has something dog-like about him. When I first met him I was reminded of a jaunty terrier, cheerfully sniffing around me. If he had a tail it would wave plumily and happily. Many men are like that; they're like dogs sniffing for a bitch on heat. G is gregarious, and enjoys human company far more than I. He's bigger than I both in height and width and when he walks in the door at the end of the working day the house seems much smaller and less spacious. It's a small place anyway but suddenly, like the cats, I'm having to weave around furniture and G to get from point A to B.

You've all seen that joke Diary of a Cat and Diary of a Dog. The cat's diary tells of plots and plans of escape; it is complex, while for the dog everything except a bath is simply "My favourite thing!"

G reminds me of the dog's diary every mealtime. Even if it's only bacon and eggs for breakfast, or a simple steak and veg for dinner, or even just crackers and cheese for lunch, he responds the same: "Oh Wow!" When I present him with a divine and powerful curry, or a dish that has taken a couple of hours to pull together perfectly, it's still "Oh Wow!" My favourite thing! I have to laugh. (And he eats like a dog too, shovelling food into his gob as quickly as humanly possible!)

Like our dog, G manages to position himself in my path when I'm trying to do things around the house. I do most of the cooking because I truly enjoy it, and it's a creative release at the end of the working day - that or the opportunity to take my frustration out on food with a big, sharp knife! Whichever cupboard I need to open, I can guarantee that G will have moved himself in front of it, arms hanging gormlessly at his sides.  If it's not him, it's our dog. With the dog, I can point to the door and say "Out!" and she'll give me That Dog Look and move to the living room. With G, it's a constant, polite "Excuse me," as I move him from in front of the cupboards time and again, until he gets the message and stands next to the dog! (The cats, meanwhile, have found themselves high perches out of the way.)

G loves me with a dog-like devotion. This is a good thing, as my previous relationships were mostly toxic, with me being the one doing all the loving. He has had very high-maintenance, cloying women in his past and when we first started dating he used to ring me from his home interstate every night. I mean every night. Sweet as it was it could be a bloody nuisance if I was going out with friends; if he couldn't get me on the home phone he'd try the mobile, worried that I'd be annoyed if I didn't hear from him. When he's on business travel he tries to ring every night and I've told him not to when his itinerary is a full one. I am very understanding having had jobs in the past myself which involve quite a bit of business travel and won't get cross or feel abandoned if the phone doesn't ring. Like our dog, I think he suffers a bit of separation anxiety when he's away from me!

Still, I am blessed. I have two beautiful and loving cats (really! they are!), a lovely dog and a great husband. Love my own company and my solitude as I do, I suspect I am better with him in my life than I was before I met him.

So, can you draw a cat or dog parallel with your partner - or yourself?

Dots before my eyes.

Today's Mondayitis is brought to you by blue dots. Not to mention red and green ones.

Well, it isn't, really, it's brought to you by having to go out tonight to a networking function I have co-organised.  I always get depressed in the daytime before I have to go to these functions. Y'see, the networking functions are at the end of the day when I've had enough of the human race. I don't want to be changing into my business attire at 4pm and heading out. It's time to head home. Once I'm at the functions I'm fine though; get a glass of chardy into me and I'm quite cheerful.

But back to the blue dots.

The board which runs the association for which I do the networking nights is all in a kerfuffle about putting coloured dots on the name badges of the attendees for tonight's function. A blue dot means they are top level members, a green dot will mean they are middle level and a red dot means they are the lowest level.

My co-organiser for the event, whom I shall call The Fit One (as she is, she teaches gym classes part time), has already put dots on the name tags.

The poor chook will now have to take them off following a heated email discussion about the colour of the dots and whether all three levels of membership need dots.

Someone said they should be gold, silver and bronze instead. Just try buying bronze sticky dots at the newsagent, my friend. You might get the gold and silver, except they are likely to be star-shaped; the stickers which cheer up the kids in infants' school.

Someone else said only the top level members should get dots so people could see they were 'important'.

This was all getting a bit heated.

Our Leader (chairman of the board) has now sent an email around saying there will be no dots at all at tonight's meeting and we will discuss, as a board, the way forward regarding dots at the next board meeting.

The Fit One will be annoyed right now as she'll have to peel off all the dots as we undoubtedly don't have enough spare name tags WITHOUT dots!

Our Leader is taking her duties very seriously. She has developed a slightly patronising style of writing which irks me somewhat as the pedantic English she uses is often misspelt. If you can't spell it, don't write it down. The syntax bugs me though. She's trying to sound smarter and more imposing than she really is. It doesn't go with her bumfreezer skirts and low cut tops.

So we will spend at least fifteen minutes at the next board meeting talking about dots. Maybe the dot problem will be resolved, maybe it won't.

We have a very active Board at the moment who find a lot of ideas for The Fit One and I to pursue which is fine, but we have a very limited budget and the switch from blue dots to gold could make the difference between being in the black and the red.

It's enough to send you dotty.

I've seen the light. It's on the dining table.

I think I've mentioned before that my husband G is not a handyman. I'm the practical one of the pair.

However, I don't like doing DIY stuff on anything electric. Stuffing up things electrical can lead to blown fuses - a minor complaint - up and onwards to electric shocks or house fires.

Having worked on a DIY partworks magazine 30 years ago, G believes he has absorbed things that the DIY people working on the mag did and explained (G's job was to actually write the articles). Sometimes this works well. Other times it's nightmarish, and he's bitten off more than he can chew.

You'd think simply wiring in a cheap array of downlights would be an easy job.  It SHOULD be an easy job, theoretically.

You undo the existing light fitting, note which wires went where, and install them to the new.

Well.

Well.

Where do I begin? Do I start with the swearing, a superb display of invective ending up in "You f*cking c***ing bastard of a c***!!"?

Do I mention the mouse shit that poured out of the light fitting hole when we removed the existing fitting?

Do I focus instead on the fact that instead of a simple array of one each of red, green and black wires we had multiples of same with the black wired into two holes not just one?

Do I talk about the excruciating half hour we spent on two ladders with G sweating and swearing and trying to force those bloody wires into the new fitting, head on one side because of the ceiling, before finally realising you could take out a couple of screws in the new fitting and free up the wiring section so you could fit in new wires much more easily?

I should certainly complete the tale of the hour's work with the information that once the wires were correctly installed and a bulb fitted for testing, that flicking on the electrical phase that controlled the lights turned the bulb on. Hurrah. Except the light switch was set to OFF. And when we turned it ON, the bulb went out and the safety switch clicked on, turning the electrical lights phase safely to off again.

That's when the swearing hit a new crescendo.  (See above)

Cue another go at the wiring in case the L and N were the wrong way around. Same deal. Bulb went on when it was supposed to be off.

That's when we gave up on the new light fitting and decided it was dodgy. No wonder it was cheap! Where was the receipt? Was it in the drawer?  What the hell, let's just put the old light fitting back for now.

So we did. Or G did. And we had the same problem with the light bulb being on when it should be off.

So now the light fittings old and new are sitting on the dining table, and I'm looking up electricians on True Local. I'm hoping that our wires aren't buggered because of the mice (which are no longer with us, I hasten to add).

G has forsworn all things DIY. Until next time!

Blackballed - but who knew?

My... er... friend Whingy is always a great source of material for this blog. I think I'll turn her into a fictional anti-heroine and write a novel about her.

Keen readers (if there are any) will know that La Whinge takes offence at the slightest thing. At something you may have said. At something you didn't say when you were supposed to. At you not providing enough sympathy for her current woes. She reserves her most scathing fury for people she considers to be rude.

Which doesn't stop Whingy being rude herself.  I'm so used to it now I have to hold back giggles in her presence when she blows her top. Receiving rudeness by email means I can both swear at her and laugh out loud and she won't know.

Take this story. My husband G has been away on a business trip. I had invited the Whingies to dinner on Saturday night, thinking he'd be back by then. They accepted (Miracle!  We live 40 minutes' drive from their place and that's usually too far for them to bother to travel just to see us, and they have a standing commitment most Saturday nights with a ballroom dancing class). However, his itinerary changed and he was coming back on the Sunday. I emailed Whingy and told her it would be just me and the animals for Saturday night dinner but we'd all still love to have them over and catch up.

The reply came back with the message that they would make it another time as they could do more household and gardening chores with the spare time on Saturday afternoon and evening.

Well! Rude or what!? I had to laugh. It was such a typical response.  Obviously I wasn't enough of a drawcard. After swearing a bit too and calling her a rude cow, I typed a little reply saying simply that I understood perfectly. My tongue was in my cheek quite snugly; I understood perfectly that she was a rude bitch and that my company alone clearly wasn't competition for household chores.

A couple of days ago I was chatting to D, a mutual friend who has known the Whingies a bit longer than I have, and told him about the dinner invitation and her change of mind.

"You mean she was going to come when G was there, but said no when she found out he was away? That's strange," said D. "She doesn't like G. I thought she'd be more inclined to come if he wasn't there."

I was stunned. "What do you mean she doesn't like him?"

"Well, remember last time you were all here at my place?" (That was many months ago as D lives even further from the Whingies than we do, and it's all too hard for the Whingies to drive over and see him.) "She wasn't talking to him. She'd blackballed him. He must have said something wrong to her at some time."

I hadn't noticed and said so.

"Ah, but you don't notice these things, do you?" said D a little archly. He's right. I'm no great student of human nature and behaviour. This means I make many gaffes and accidentally rub people up the wrong way.

We've seen the Whingies a few times since then though and I'm sure Whingy has spoken to G over dinner. At least I think I'm sure. For all I know he's still blackballed.

Last night I told G he'd been blackballed and he roared with laughter, almost spilling his beer. "I had no idea!"

"Nor did I!" I giggled.

I suspect the Whingies have the shits with us anyway, as we've had some lovely social occasions out our way earlier this year and haven't included them. Given that they don't want to bother driving out to our place too often, I'm sure they wouldn't want to drag themselves an extra hour to go to the things we've gone to.

One of those was a Tango night, which included dinner and rudimentary Tango lessons. G and I were actually guests at another friend's table, so I had a good excuse not to invite the Whingies to come with us.

I knew they would sneer at the Tango night as being for beginners and being amateurish, not to mention making fun of G's and my attempts to have a dance ourselves, whereas they, of course, are Experts and have been learning the Tango for about 18 months. I haven't seen them dance the Tango, but my experience of watching them do other dances is that their faces are masks of concentration, not a smile to be seen, and La Whinge constantly nags Mr Whinge about forgetting the steps. Surely dancing is supposed to be fun, and joyful?

Anyhow I told La Whinge about the Tango night after the event and explained that we had been someone else's guests, and she asked about the dancing itself.

I gave her a good description of the night, and her nose went up.

"Oh, that's Argentinian Tango," she said snobbily, dismissing the passion and fire of the original Tango and its earthy origins around the docksides and ladies of the night with a wave of her hand. "They do that weird thing where they wave their legs about. WE do Ballroom Tango."

Give me Argentinian Tango any day in that case. I'm even considering taking lessons myself and G is rather keen too. We'll probably be blackballed by the Whingies again but I suspect I won't notice.

On the road again...

Cerulean blue skies, studded with dainty white clouds, which go on forever above hills that, over the course of the day, change colour from dry sandy gold to a lush green as we travel north to Sydney.  The ribbon of grey in front of us, curving, rising, falling.

And the same 6 CDs playing over and over because the sound system in the car is a bit temperamental and we don't want to tempt fate by changing them.

Yes, I've been on a road trip. I would have loved to have blogged during the trip but frankly there wasn't much time. My reason for going was a specific photography assignment, and for several evenings all I did was sort through the 1500 or so pics I took at the Avalon Airshow.

I flew down to Avalon near Geelong just over a week ago, leaving Sydney wet and grim behind me. Avalon was sunny and dry, however, sunny enough to give me a red face on the first day I hauled my camera gear to the show.

My work there done, I left my husband at the show and took the car for a wander around the Bellarine peninsula. Isn't that a lovely name, Bellarine? And the area lives up to it.

From Geelong I headed out to Portarlington, with its fishing boat jetty. I love fishing boats; they look honest and seaworthy, chunky and as cuddly as a boat can be. They have character, particularly the smaller ones. Yes, I do tend to anthropomorphise but you would too if you saw these little cuties:

After a pleasant stroll around the jetty I took The Esplanade, which sounded more interesting than the main road. I didn't know it would reach all the way to St Leonards via Indented Head (which made me laugh out loud). The Esplanade (or whatever it was called by the end of the road) ran beside the sea, with the beach on one side and houses with views to die for on the other. Old houses, new houses, sea shacks and McMansions mixed it up. The sea breeze stirred the air gently, and I felt all the stress inside me melt and escape out to sea as I followed the road around tussocks of sea grass, rocky cliffs and spellbinding views.

My main destination for the day was Queenscliff. Initially settled in the mid-1800s, by the twentieth century it had become a posh seaside destination for Melbournians. There were bathing boxes and bathing machines (which, operated by a hopefully trusty servant, dunked one into the sea and then up out again). Ladies and gents promenaded along the waterfront, walked along the cliff to see the unusual black lighthouse, and stayed in one of the gorgeous Italianate mansions which operated as guest houses or one of the big, luxurious hotels. By the 1930s mixed bathing was permitted on the beach. Gosh! I can imagine Cole Porter's Anything Goes was a popular and apt song for the wealthy people who spent their summers enjoying Queenscliff's sea breeze in the '30s.

For one reason or another - perhaps for once a local Council saw sense - Queenscliff's older buildings are still there. In the heart of the town there are not many buildings newer than the 1920s. It's a living, breathing place though and not a time warp. But it's lovely to walk into a shop, turn around and look up at the light streaming through leadlight windows. 

I got chatting to the owners of a couple of shops, and Queenscliff is still essentially a summer place. The owner of a lingerie shop said she wasn't renewing her lease which was due next month. The "season" was over until the spring. The bookshop owner said she was going to renew, but didn't expect to do a great trade after Labor Day, which is next Monday. I personally think it would be a fab place to visit in winter, with the wind roaring up from Bass Strait. 

After walking around for an hour or so and enjoying a delicious zucchini slice and salad, I headed for Ocean Grove, which is the biggest of the towns on the peninsula (aside obviously from Geelong). Ocean Grove is more modern, so I kept driving and crossed the bridge into Barwon Heads, which was (together with St Leonards)one of the settings for the quirky ABC tv series SeaChange. In the series, the bridge to "Pearl Bay" had been destroyed years before and plans to build a new bridge always went awry. Luckily one of the CDs in G's car was the SeaChange soundtrack - very apt!

My final port of call for the day was Torquay, which boats a surfers' museum and a bloody huge Bunnings, as well as bloody huge surf shops on either side of the road as you enter the heart of town. I was expecting to see bloody huge waves too, but the surf was flat. 

The next day we started our journey north again to Sydney, via Kyneton (for a pie. Bakery pies were a reoccuring theme on our drive home), Castlemaine and Maldon, stopping at Bendigo for the night.

Maldon, below, is another place which has escaped developers. In this case through no fault of its own. It was a goldfields town and the population had dwindled by the 1950s. There was no point in redeveloping. The National Trust took a long hard look and shoved a preservation order on the whole town centre. So what you see is a Victorian town in Victoria.

Maldon survives on tourist trade. We were there midweek, outside school holidays, and you could have let off a bomb and not injured a soul. I suspect it's hotching at weekends as it's only an hour or so out of Melbourne.

I love Bendigo. It's a thriving town that was built on wealth from both the goldfields and wool. It has magnificent stone buildings and has echoes of Paris about it, such as this lamppost:

Bendigo is parks and fountains, statues and decoration. This, for example, is the town hall:

I couldn't fit the whole town hall in, even from across the street.

And here's a touch of Paris in the shape of the law courts. 

Bendigo is a university town, so it's a lively place. We love the Shamrock Hotel, where the food is great and the wine list pretty good for a country town. I enjoyed a glass of Ladies Who Shoot Their Lunch chardonnay. Not just well-named but well-crafted too. 

We only stayed a night, but managed to cram in a good walk around the city centre. But then it was off to Albury to stay with my cousin for a night, via a pie in Benalla.

We were making good time as the SeaChange CD came up for the seventh time in five days, so stopped at Glenrowan to see how the town was making a dollar out of Ned Kelly. Ned's everywhere. We walked around the siege area, went into a museum but declined to spend 40 minutes watching a reenactment of the siege (which interestingly runs every 30 minutes). We amused ourselves at the museum trying to teach the two pet cockatoos to say "bugger off", big kids that we are.

Is Ned larger than life? You bet!

Victoria produces some superb wines but after an hour in Glenrowan realised we were running out of time and could only do one cellar door, so we headed into the first one we could find in the Rutherglen region - Scion Wines.  Tall, dark and handsome Rowly ran us through the tastings and we bought half a dozen mixed wines. Rowly and his Mum do interesting things with the grape varieties they grow, and produce unique wines, with pronounced flavours and a delicate balance.  Their After Dark dessert wine tastes amazing with dark chocolate - they keep some on hand to go with the tasting. Not something you find in every cellar door!

My cousin lives on a small property just outside Albury, and two of my other cousins joined us for a fantastic evening of stories, giggles and chats about family history. Plenty of wine was drunk all around. Must have been good stuff though as none of us had a headache or hangover the next day.

Australian place names can often cause a grin and Burrumbuttock, near Jindera, was enough of a giggle to warrant a photo.

G and I started being very silly at this point: "Ooh, I'm going to burrum your buttock if you're not careful!"

A highlight of our drive through NSW was the compulsory stop at the bakery at Holbrook for one of the best country meat pies you can find. I'd been salivating since breakfast thinking about it. It didn't let me down. I'm cursing that I didn't take pics of my pies as we journeyed about as it would make a great blog post or even travel article - The Life of Pie! Anyway the Holbrook pie I chose this time was a Bushman's pie. I usually have the steak and kidney or steak and mushroom, but this was was steak and veggie, and it was superb. Plenty of cracked black pepper throughout and chunks of carrot, pieces of corn and peas nestled in the gravy.

It's been a hot, dry summer down south. Throughout country Victoria the grass was parched and pale; livestock were scattered sparsely as the nutrition per hectare was small. In the five hours it took to get from Holbrook to Sydney the change was gradual. At first there was a smattering of greener grass here and there; around dams, near homesteads. The hills were resolutely the dry shade of sauvignon blanc, but slowly morphed into an equally dry pale green north of Gundagai. Dams started to look full and more livestock were sheltering from the sun under trees.

North of Yass and into the southern highlands, we felt spoilt. There had been SO much rain in the last month, the grass was blindingly verdant, lush and soft. 

Then we hit Sydney and peak hour traffic, and while the sky was still blue it wasn't as big any longer, and the magic fell away from the day more and more with every red traffic light that ground us to a halt as SeaChange played for the ninth time. The utter, blissful, carefree freedom I'd enjoyed for the last week vanished. I don't like to end a happy post on a note of depression but I was as blue as can be last night and this morning, with 150 new emails in the inbox in the last 36 hours alone, one of my client's websites broken (by them, not me but I still have to fix it) and a garden area ruined during by absence by a cowboy garden maintenance man.

I was put in mind of the last verse of Clancy of the Overflow: 

And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal —
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of "The Overflow".

Frankly, I'd make a crap drover. But a few weeks in big sky country, away from all work pressures, sounds like bliss.  I can't wait to get on the road again...

It's hard being a girl - at least it used to be

Earlier this week I was watching The Agony of Life on ABC1, a show where well-known and (to me) not well-known people talk about life, the universe and not quite everything. No, not this blog. I wish they did. More readers would be good.

But I digress. Back to the show. This week it was all about the teen years, with guests revealing, to a man and woman, they were NOT cool kids. I can relate to that!

One of the questions presenter Adam Zwar posed was "How did your parents tell you the facts of life?" Ah, The Talk! The answers were varied and often hilarious.

Unlike laconic comedian Judith Lucy, who was a late bloomer ("I didn't have breasts until I was nineteen. I woke up one morning and THEY'D ARRIVED!") I was an early starter.

I was ten when Mum sat me down with a book on Menstruation (aka The Talk). It looked very dated - 1950s or early 1960s.  It was supposed to be written in a friendly style but friendly styles in those days were very stilted. People were embarrassed to talk about the fact that once a month girls start bleeding like stuck pigs. It was full of diagrams, and dry paragraphs. I read it and decided I didn't want to get my periods; sadly I didn't have much choice in the matter and a few months later found blood in my knickers one morning.

Couldn't find an English language ad but this brings back bad memories.

Well, if that wasn't bad enough, sanitary napkins in those days were a far cry from today's. We're talking early 70s. These things were the size of surfboards. And stick-on pads were just about to come onto the market. However, that was a year in the future and the only option was to wear Modess panties, bloody huge underwear with a plastic gusset in the crotch, and elastic strips at each end of the gusset. The sanitary napkins - oh bugger that, call them pads - were stuck under the elastic to hold it in place. I swear these knickers creaked and squeaked when you moved. They didn't hold the pads in place very well either, I was always conscious of the stupid things moving up my back or creeping forward. I was embarrassed beyond belief. I cried every month.

I can't tell you how unspeakable these were.

The other option was the sanitary belt. The pads in those days had foldout strips at each end which you could shove into the little rings on the sanitary belt. The belt was adjustable/elastic. The idea was it would hold the pad in place. I tried it. And tried it. And tried it. It didn't.

Worst of all about wearing surfboards in your underwear was that if you wore jeans or trousers - and I was a tomboy, I LIVED in jeans! - the stupid things were just a bit visible. From behind it looked like you'd crapped your pants. From the front...well, you looked a bit like a boy. I had to be paid to wear a dress in those days. The idea of having to wear a dress or skirt for at least five days a month was abominable so I stayed in jeans and rocked the got-a-willy/crapped-my-pants look.

Then stick-on pads became available. I begged Mum to buy me some. Anything but those creaky, sweaty plastic knickers. These days stick-on pads are pretty good. They have 'wings' to stop leakage. The adhesive is great. They are much thinner than they used be; bless technology. The 1970s stick on pads were shockers. They were still surfboard sized, they still were visible in trousers, but the adhesive was hopeless. One little strip down the middle that didn't stay stuck for very long, so the pad started creeping around your underwear. This meant - oh yes - they leaked.

Sick of having bloodstains on my jeans I regretfully started sticking the would-be stick-ons to the plastic knickers as the adhesive stuck to the plastic quite well. I was one of those unlucky girls who had heavy periods, and heavy period pain to go with them. I envied girls who only bled lightly for three days. I had one week a month of misery.

Then there was the whole palaver of taking spare pads to school to change at lunchtime; they looked pretty obvious and I used to hide them in my brown paper bag with my sandwich and apple.

I wonder if pad technology would have been a lot better a lot earlier if more women had been involved in the development process. I'm guessing that in the 60s and 70s most of the scientists working on sanitary products were men. Being men they were probably embarrassed about the whole job, and certainly didn't talk about their work down at the local pub. They probably said they were working on kitty litter or something instead. Seriously, consider wings on modern pads. A woman had to think that one up, surely. And probably borne of leakage experience. A bloke wouldn't consider something so logical. If they could make pads in the 70s with long strips at either end, they could have made them with strips at the side. But they didn't.

I was so glad the day I discovered tampons.  But girls these days, with a wealth of ultra-thin, ultra-absorbent, wing-bearing pads to choose from - they don't know how lucky they are!

Housanality

Ok, what's Housanality? Well, people have personality, houses have housanality. OK, I just made that up. But think about it, it works, doesn't it?

This is the context I'm talking about:  In our group of 8 townhouses we find that certain types of people live in certain houses in our complex.

For example, house number 2 attracts noisy people. The tenants before the current lot screamed and argued with each other on a daily basis. We were tempted to call the police once or twice when it threatened to become physically violent but luckily they backed off. Often outside, too, in their courtyard, so they could share the hate with their neighbours. The courtyard is number 2 is a bit of a noise amplifier because of the shape of it, we think. Every shout is magnified.

The current tenants in number 2 are loud, too. Like the previous tenants they are from India or Sri Lanka. It seems many Indian women have LOUD voices. Maybe they have to shout to make themselves heard above city noise in India. I'm not trying to be racist here. But most of our neighbours are Indian or Sri Lankan, and the women have voices which can clear blocked drains. Fact.

Anyway, our neighbours in 2 have a toddler, and they play, at loud volume, a CD of nursery rhymes in English, but with an Indian accent. We can hear them clearly in our own house. These songs become ear worms for me; I get "to marrrket, to marrrket, to buy a fat pig" stuck in my head for minutes at a time. It's worse when the child's mother, who we call Gobbler (more on that soon), sings along. She shouts loudly and tunelessly; the funniest song is Baa Baa Black Sheep, when Gobbler bellows, "YES, sir, YES, sir, thrrrree bags FULL!!!!"

The kid cries and screams a lot as all toddlers do, and then Gobbler gobbles to him. Yes, she could be mistaken for a turkey. She does an amazing turkey imitation, heaven knows why, and I swear that kid is going to grow up believing he's raised by poultry. When she's not gobbling, or singing, she talks to him, either in Hindi or parrotting back his own baby noises at high volume. Needless to say whenever it's not raining all the action takes place in their courtyard, so we hear every gobble whether we want to or not.

Then there is number 5. Number 5 attracts noisy dogs. The owners had two dogs there a few years back before they bought a bigger place and moved out, and their dogs barked and barked and barked and barked and barked. At nothing. When the owners were at work and I was busy working at home I wasn't above turning a hose on the bloody animals to shut them up. Now the place is tenanted and guess what, a noisy dog lives there. He barks and barks and barks, but usually for a reason, ie someone is walking down the street 25 metres away. His bark gets higher in pitch the more excited he gets until he sounds as if he's being strangled. When the maintenance men did the lawns today I thought he was going to choke. Thankfully, unlike the previous dogs, if you go out and say his name gently and tell him to be quiet, he'll look you in the eye and shut up. He's nice. If noisy.

Whoever lives in number 8 is scared of dogs. The previous owners were petrified of our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, who does have a nasty habit of rushing out of the front door and barking at people from a distance. We're trying to get her out of it but she's determined to protect us from our neighbours, all of whom she knows well and likes. On the lead she's fine but off lead she's a wolf. So we try and keep her on the lead when we go out front. But... a few weeks back we'd been out in the car with her and we let her  jump out of the back seat. G went to open the front door of the house thinking she'd follow him but our dog spied the new guy in number 8 and went galloping up to him, barking, tail wagging frantically. Harmless but loud. Poor guy - he's scared of dogs and he ran to his car and jumped onto the bonnet, then the roof. I couldn't believe it! I was mortified. Poor bloke! He's Indian and I've met many Indians around here who are frightened of dogs. I had to grab our dog and apologise profusely. Inside our house G and I collapsed in cruel laughter as jumping on your own car was like something from a movie.

So there are the personality traits of a few of our neighbouring houses. Numbers 3 and 6 attract quiet people; we've seen a couple of families come and go in each of them over seven years and we've never heard a single shout. Numbers 1 and 7 I can't make a comment on, as the people in them have lived there longer than we have; will number 1's future owners have a penchant for white fluffy dogs and twee garden statues? Will number 7's future owners be outgoing and friendly?

Who knows? The local council is likely to rezone our entire street to high density housing, and if developers make us owners an offer we don't want to refuse, our houses, and their housanalities, may be gone forever in a few years, replaced by an apartment block. That's a sad thought as apart from KFC on the corner this is a quiet street, a neighbourly place, a sleepy hollow where houses sit on quarter acre blocks and kids still play cricket in their back gardens. Once land is gone, it's gone. And so is a way of life.