Sausagemouse

My Dear Princess and Dear Friends,

You may remember a couple of months back I went on a Mystery Roadtrip with Tiger which ended up with me being mugged by a cockatoo and bitten by a horse.

Well, look out Animal Kingdom, because today we went on the road again!

I knew something was up because as soon as I got in the car, "A Kind of Magic" was playing. "Today we're going on a road trip INTO THE PAST!!!" said Tiger. 

What he had in mind, he revealed, was to take me to Johnsonville and Newlands - these are the parts of Wellington in which he had grown up and so the plan was, we would visit Tiger's Childhood and just generally hang out and talk b*llocks.

I loved this plan. I love b*llocks.

Along the way, we talked a little about Loulou, who has been having a really rough time with chemo lately. She has been fitted with a port to enable easier admission of the "infusions" to treat her cancer. The port itself was very painful and intrusive at first and it sounds like she really suffered for the first couple of days. 

However, the good news is that it appears to have been worth it. The last infusion went much better than previous ones, said Tiger and they had a reasonable day.

"Although it shows how low the bar has been set that we now consider a day without tears or vomit to be 'good'," he added. 

I have described Tiger before but I need to re-emphasise he is just A Good Sort. A good soul. I'd never really understood the phrase Hail Fellow Well Met before I met him. He exudes good spirits, fun and love. He greeted me with a hearty hug the very first time I met him, and there is a constant glint in his eye that naughtiness is imminent. 

Our talk sometimes strays to the political or philosophical. But more often comes back to fannies and willies.

Shocking, I know. Fortunately I am able to overlook such childish and immature chat, my dear friends.

Tiger drove me to the neighbourhood he grew up in and described a life with his brother and sister on the (then) northern outskirts of Wellington. "This was considered bogan territory back then," he said. He conjured up a picture of working-class families, teenage sons in hot-rods, and hordes of children playing in each other's backyards. 

Their neighbourhood was surrounded by either farms, or farms in the process of being subdivided to make way for new housing estates. Consequently there were LOADS of good places to get into mischief. Excavation craters in abandoned building sites that turned into froggy ponds, old hunter trails that cut through the bush and abandoned skips full of TREASURE!

"One of the electronics stores used to dump all their seconds or returned goods into a skip by the railway line," he told me. "So we figured out the security guard times and then we'd sneak in there and just take ARMFULS of the stuff."

He described the booty. Clock radios that didn't show the hour. Digital watches with straps missing. And a pot and pan set with one pot missing.

"I'd take this stuff to school and sell it," he told me. "But the pan set I wrapped up and gave to me mum." She was impressed. That must have cost him a FORTUNE.

Tiger proudly replied that yes, he'd saved up his pocket money for AGES.

But there was a problem. One of the pans in the set was actually faulty and he hadn't realised. Where did he get the set? asked his mum. What store? Did he have the receipt? If not, could he remember the EXACT TIME AND PLACE so she could return it?

"Bloody hell," said Tiger. "I had to avoid her for WEEKS."

It sounds like he, his siblings and his friends ran WILD around that neighbourhood. They would tight-rope along fences to see how far they could go before they had to touch ground. It turns out he could get about six streets away before plopping into one of his mate's back gardens to play. And then there was The Short-Cut To School...

"But it was through THE SCRIVENERS back yard," he explained. "They were this terrifying family of bullies. So you'd cut through and then you'd hear..."

OI YOU, YOU LITTLE C***!!!

And the chase would be ON! 

"That got your adrenalin going," said Tiger. "Fortunately there were such large people they were only good going downhill. All you had to do was get them on the incline and they gave up on you in seconds."

We passed the Scriveners' house without incident, and passed by the house of Jacinta Bowler. 

"She was the first girl I ever fell in love with," sighed Tiger. "She had it all. Pigtails. Braces. Acne."

It sounds like he was quite the romantic. He then told me the sad tale of Michelle Andrews. "I was so in love with her," he told me. "I made her a Valentine's Day card but then I was too scared to give it to her. I stood outside her house in the rain for ages, but in the end I gave up and went home."

He shoved the card in the back of his wardrobe, where his mother found it. 

"Oh no," I said, "she didn't. Did she?"

"Naaah," said Tiger. "But she did save it for years and bring it out at my 21st birthday party. And because it was all rain-spattered my mates were all saying, 'Are those your teeeeeeeeears?' Who knows. Maybe they were. But my tears were smaller than raindrops so it was hard to say what sort of moisture it was."

That twinkle in his eyes. Hold on folks, he's about to say something DISGUSTING.

"And I was too young for it to be any other sort of moisture either," he added. "Like, 'Here you go Michelle, I was thinking of you last night - SQUELCH'."

Tiger delights in this sort of talk. Honestly. I don't care for it. As well you know*.

He told me another story about the rather prominent house on the edge of the hill you can see on the right of today's picture. "My mate lived in that house and he had EPIC parties," Tiger told me. "At one of those parties a rumour went around that his attractive sister was giving blow-jobs in the bedroom so we were hanging from the balcony trying to get a look. She wasn't of course," he said, sadly. 

The bay you can see in the picture is full of Tiger History. It reaches out to the island you can see in the extra, where Tiger's dad would dump him and his mates when Tiger's dad went fishing. 

"It was GREAT," said Tiger. "We'd spend the whole day on the island, having adventures, building forts and making fires. Then dad would pick us up at the end of the day."

His dad loved history and stories and took Tiger all around the bay, showing him the gun emplacements that the Kiwis put in, when the Japanese were expanding throughout the Pacific in the 1940's. 

But then we returned to the subject of sex. It is understandable. We are discussing Tiger's teenage years here, after all. 

"Up in this field were horses," Tiger said. "And that was where all the teenage girls went. At first I thought girls were just gross, but as I became a teenager myself, I was all, 'Hello! Jodhpurs!'"

He especially liked a girl called Claire who loved horses and so he got into horse-riding himself to be able to talk to her. They also shared a love of music and went to loads of gigs together and started going out. But then she had a terrible horse-riding accident which put her in the hospital for ages**. When she returned, she found she had a big insurance payout and went travelling, leaving Tiger behind. 

"She went to London, and would send me her ticket stubs for Metallica and Guns 'n' Roses," he said. "I was so envious, and she was away for years so we lost touch."

But then one night, he saw her in a pub in Johnsonville. "I was with Andrew, my absolute sleaziest friend, he was just disgusting. So I ditched him to talk to her," said Tiger. "When we started chatting we picked up right where we left off but over her shoulder I could see Andrew dry-humping the wall and making hideous sex faces."

Unfortunately Claire turned around at this point.

"Is he a FRIEND of yours?" she asked.
"Naaaah. He's just some mental bloke," explained Tiger, lying his arse off.

The problem was this. Claire had by now DONE her overseas experience and got it out of her system. Meanwhile, Tiger was GAGGING to travel. "Okay, we'll go to London but I bet you decide you don't want to come back," said Claire.

They spent six weeks in London in the early 2000's. Tiger tried things he'd never done before. He'd always enjoyed music and drinking but now he got to try music and drinking AND PILLS. He had gone to the next level. 

"I didn't want to come back. Ever," he said. 

Nevertheless the couple stayed together. And it was on a particularly hungover New Year's Day he decided to make a particularly romantic gesture. He was going to take her to the bank of the Thames to propose.

"And it was nearly impossible because she was SO hungover," he explained. "I really had to COAX her down to the Thames and then I finally proposed even though she was green and bleary-eyed. But we noticed that people had just ditched all their winter clothes in the previous night's street party. There were hats and gloves and scarves everywhere. So we decided to wear it all, and got back to our hotel in layers of gloves and mittens and dozens of scarves."

The pair spent a fun year or so in the UK and then came back to New Zealand - settling back in Johnsonville itself in a house with a paddock and horses. 

"And there was just something about it being my future," said Tiger. "That it was all settled and laid out for me. And that I hardly moved from where I grew up." 

Tiger is an itchy-footed traveller. Even to this day. 

So Claire got more and more into her horses and Tiger got more and more into his drinking and it became a wedge between them. After two years of marriage they gave it up and went their separate ways. I don't know if there were fights or recriminations but it didn't seem that way. Tiger talked about Claire with affection and placed the blame squarely upon himself for getting married too early before he knew what he wanted to do with his life.

What he wanted to do was TRAVEL. And that is exactly what he did. Honestly, I don't know half his travel stories yet, but he's been to Bhutan, to Malaysia and of course, back to Edinburgh. Where his story does not yet - quite - intersect with Loulou's. They didn't meet until they were back in New Zealand. 

But that is another tale for another time.

You may wonder what me and Tiger have been up to all of this time. Actually we've been buying cupcakes and whisky. A strange combination, I'm sure you'll agree but we were also planning for going to Joshua's 50th birthday party tonight. 

We picked up Caro and headed on over there for the evening. It was a lovely, festive occasion where we met Joshua's immediate family and there were a lot of old family stories told. This time of Joshua's youth, growing up with a brother and a sister as the kids of a military fellow and travelling the globe. 

If pieces are falling into place - about why we are all friends - I must admit, I too, can see the pattern. We all have open, curious minds. We love to travel, we like food, we like music. We LOVES stories. And we especially love stories about willies and fannies. 

Caro brought us right up to the present. Her wrist - which I have mentioned before - is still giving her trouble. She was at her physio today, who was putting her wrist through its paces - getting her to adopt "hand-positions" to see which cause her the most pain. Pushing down on surfaces is hard. Picking up pens is difficult. "But then there's The Sausage," she said. She described it as the hand position you adopt when holding a sausage. 

Which I expect you can imagine. 

Tiger raised an eyebrow. I expect you can imagine that too. 

"And that's the one which causes me the most pain," explained Caro. "Which is rubbish because I use the sausage on the mouse," she went on.

"On your what? On your Sausage-Mouse?" asked Tiger.

"No, no," said Caro, "My mouse on my computer. When I handle the mouse I use the sausage..."

"All I heard was Sausagemouse," said Tiger. "And you were making that gesture. And I just wondered if it was Symon's nickname..."

THAT set the pair of them off. For about 10 minutes. And now I have a new nickname. 

For goodness' sake. It is a good thing I am the intellectual of this group.

Yours,

"Sausagemouse".

* The fact that I was crying laughing was just to cover my discomfiture, as I'm sure you will understand.

** Cue the Our Tune Theme.