Where I’ve Been (Or: One Boat, Six Days, And Twelve Hundred And Forty Cans Of Cat Food)

Hello. Yes. I’m still here. I know it’s been quiet — a fortnight of quiet, in fact, which I’m told is long enough for people to start wondering. In my defence I wasn’t gone the whole time. I was gone Saturday to Thursday. The rest of the silence was just me, here, not writing anything down.

I’d love to tell you I’ve been off doing something glamorous. A writing retreat, perhaps, in a stone cottage with a view and someone bringing me coffee at respectable intervals. A research trip. A festival. Something with a lanyard.

No.

I went to Victoria to buy cat food.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think it deserves your full attention. I crossed Bass Strait. On a boat. Like a person with purpose. And the purpose was tinned meat.

Now, in my defence — and I would like the record to show that I have a defence, and that this time it comes with numbers — there are fifteen cats living at this stationhouse. Fifteen. That is not a household, that is a small municipality with opinions. Add to that the chickens, the ducks, the geese, and the guinea fowl (who I remain convinced are simply feathered alarm systems that occasionally lay), and what you have is less a home and more a fully operational feeding regime with a writer attached to it.

Buying for that lot in the ordinary way — a few tins here, a few tins there, whatever the local shelf has decided to stock this fortnight — is a slow bleed. It’s the kind of expense you don’t notice until you look at it properly, and then you sit down for a bit. So somebody said we should just do a big run, and somebody else agreed, and neither of us stopped to ask whether “a big run” ought to involve a vessel with a car deck.

Reader, we booked the boat. My sister came with me, and we took two cars. That should tell you everything about the scale of ambition at play here — we did not go over there hoping to fit things in. We went over there with capacity.

I’d forgotten what the crossing is like. There is a particular kind of person who sleeps beautifully on the Spirit and I am not that person. I lay there in the dark listening to the hull doing its thing and thought about the fifteen cats at home, presumably staging a coup, and the poultry, presumably fine, because poultry are always fine. Then Devonport again on the way back and that first proper look at the Tiers, which is the moment I always know I’m home, no matter how far I’ve been or how ridiculous the errand.

Now. The arithmetic. Because I know some of you are already composing a very gentle comment about how this cannot possibly have been worth it, and I would like to get in first.

One ferry crossing. Four nights’ accommodation. Twelve hundred and forty cans of cat food and forty bags of litter.

And after the entire cost of getting there and back and sleeping in between had been taken off the top — the boat, the beds, the lot — we were still one thousand six hundred and eighty-seven dollars ahead.

One thousand six hundred and eighty-seven dollars. I have read that figure many times now and it has not stopped being funny. I did not go on a holiday. I went on a procurement operation, and it paid for itself and then handed me change.

And then, having established that we were already there and already had two cars and had frankly stopped being sensible several days earlier, we went to Costco.

I don’t want to talk about Costco at length because I’m not sure I can do it justice, but I will say this: I came home with six months’ worth of baking ingredients. Six months. Flour, sugar, the lot. I have never in my life been six months ahead on anything, including deadlines, and yet here I am, structurally prepared to bake through whatever comes.

I also came home with forty-eight rolls of toilet paper for fifteen dollars.

Fifteen dollars. Forty-eight rolls. I showed our housemate when we got home and she made a noise I can only describe as reverent. There is a stack of it in this house that you can see from the hallway and I am not moving it, because I want to look at it.

We also, while we were over there and clearly beyond saving, bought clothes. Warm ones. Properly warm ones — coats and thermals and the sort of fleecy unmentionables that a person does not buy in Tasmania in August unless something specific is coming.

Something specific is coming. We’re going to Canada in December.

I’ll write about that properly another time, because it deserves its own post and because I suspect if I start now I won’t stop. But it does mean that a not insignificant portion of a car that was supposed to be full of cat food ended up full of thermal underwear instead, and I regret nothing.

And then — because apparently we hadn’t yet located the bottom of this particular barrel — we went to IKEA.

For flatpack furniture. Because who doesn’t love a good flatpack.

I want to be very clear that I typed that sentence with a completely straight face and it is a lie in every meaningful sense. Nobody loves a flatpack. Flatpack is a thing you agree to at a distance, in a warehouse, in a good mood, and then live to regret in a hallway at nine o’clock at night surrounded by dowels while somebody reads step fourteen out loud in an increasingly clipped voice. I know this. I have known this for years. I bought it anyway. There are boxes in this house now, waiting patiently, and we both know how that ends.

Both cars came home riding low. And I mean low. There was a moment on the ramp where I did some quiet mental sums about weight limits and decided, in the great tradition of this household, not to think about it further.

I should have thought about it further.

One of the cars — the one carrying the bulk of the cat food, because of course it was — got stuck on the ramp coming off the boat. Grounded. Immovable. Sitting there with a queue of vehicles behind it and me in the driver’s seat performing the internationally recognised sequence of Trying It Again But More Confidently.

A stevedore came and got it off for us.

He did not laugh at me. I want that on the record, because he had every right to and he did not. He simply assessed the situation with the calm of a man who has seen many things come off many boats, got in, did whatever it is they do, and delivered my car and its enormous cargo of cat food safely onto Tasmanian soil. Then he handed the keys back and said something kind about how full it was.

Sir, if you’re reading this — and you are almost certainly not — you handled that with more grace than I did, and I have thought about you several times since.

Here’s the part that got me, though.

I was gone from Saturday to Thursday. Six days of not being sat on while I try to write, not being woken at ten past four by a cat with a theory, not having to check every chair before I sit in it. And I came through the door expecting — I don’t know. Something. A greeting. A parade. Some acknowledgement that the woman who crossed an entire strait on their behalf had returned.

They looked at me.

That was it. A brief and unimpressed survey of my person, an assessment that I had not brought anything of immediate interest into the room, and then a return to whatever they’d been doing. One of them yawned. I want you to understand that I saw it happen and I have not recovered.

Then, of course, the cartons started coming in, and suddenly I was the most beloved woman in the southern hemisphere. Fifteen cats materialised from fifteen separate hiding places like they’d been summoned. Absolute devotion. Total loyalty. Deep, abiding love — for approximately as long as it took to open the first can.

So that’s where I’ve been. Not writing. Not particularly resting. Just moving an enormous quantity of tinned meat, kitty litter, flour and unassembled Swedish furniture across a body of water, because I have made a series of life choices and this is where they’ve deposited me.

Normal service resumes now. There are words waiting, and a manuscript that has been sitting quietly with its hands folded, being very patient with me.

And somewhere out in the shed, enough cat food, litter, flour and toilet paper to see out a modest siege — with an allen key on standby, in case the siege gets boring.