If I Could Talk To The Animals...

LONDON'S brilliant for oh so many things. The sights, the history, the nightlife; even the amazingly eclectic array of nationalities that set up camp here. Just in my workplace alone we have Australians, South Africans, Swedes, Poles, Italians, Albanians and the occasional token Pom. It certainly livens up the place in a way that, bizarrely enough, only Cooma has matched.
Unfortunately for yours truly, there's not a real lot to do in London between 3am and 5am when you're working as the night porter ina fairly swanky hotel. The temperature's cold, the skies often bursting or about to, and all you're thinking about is getting home and dropping into a sound enough sleep so as not to wake up when the flatmates do their midday re-enactment of Pamplona's Running of the Bulls (complete with hooping and hollering).
To fill in the inevitable blanks, you tend to jump onto the net and find out what's been going on back home. Ordinarily I log onto the Sydney Morning Herald website on account of that newspaper providing some thoughtful analysis of sport and news without dipping into sensationalism. Of course, being a Queenslander I am known to drop across to the Courier-Mail's website where this interesting article recently appeared about pets (in particular pet dogs). The bloody thing made me homesick!
I can't remember a time from 0-18 when the family, or even Mum after the split, didn't have a pet of some kind. Obviously I can't remember the ones 0-5, but after that we had quite the collection of animals with their own personalities.
Top of the list would have to have been the dog Jemma. She was actually older than two of my brothers and had the memorable distinction of teaching one brother how to say "hello". Whenever we came back from a few days away, Jemma would race up to the fence and bellow "har-roh", a pronounciation Daniel (I wasn't going to embarass him, but what the hey) picked up himself!
She was a beautiful little thing - a mongrel like most of our pets - with a personality to match. Indeed, if you could say anything bad about her, it would be that she was rather fond of getting out of the yard and going walkabout.
Jemma was around 6 when we added another dog, Meila, to the menagerie. Meila was a tiny puppy - so small in fact that Dad wanted to call her Stubby on account of being able to fit in a stubby cooler - but grew large enough to avoid that "overgrown rat" status. She was one of those dogs that never backed down from a growling match, no matter how big the opposition dog was.
Our cats were pretty similar. Mim and Gypsy both had no hesitation in standing up for themselves during their times with us. Both had their troubles with attacking family members: Mim was put down after continually attacking Bryan when he was a young tacker, while Gypsy once pounced on Matt after he held her above next-door's two pig dogs!
We had a few birds as well, but the only one that remains in the memory was Peachy, a peach-faced bird (took us ages to think of that one). She came into our lives after landing on the next-door neighbour in Toowoomba. Mum put out fliers saying we'd found this obviously tamer bird, but as no-one claimed her she became ours by default. The enduring memory of Peachy has to be her perched on Bryan's shoulder as he crawled down the hallways of our Toowoomba houses.
Alas, all these have fallen by the wayside. Mum got the pets when she and Dad split up, and eventually they all succumbed to old age or wanderlust. When I left Australia almost 12 months ago neither parent had a pet; since then Mum has added a kitten that causes as much havoc as a certain Miss Hannah.
Eventually I'll settle down and stay somewhere for more than a few months: when I do a pet is pretty high up on the agenda.