This time last year we were still jet-lagged, having flown into Melbourne two days previously. We had been given the most wonderful welcome by our Airbnb hosts Cathi and Iris, and were feeling exhausted from the hectic pack up in London and the long flight. The day we left home, London was looking her best with an abundance of spring flowers blooming gloriously in gardens and window boxes, and the sun had been shining for days. The evenings were getting longer and Londoners were beginning to shed their long, wintry grey faces and glow with the expectation of summer just around the corner. We arrived here to Melburnians breathing a sigh of relief after the heat of summer and wrapping themselves up to enjoy the cooler Autumn days. There was still plenty of sunshine, and although the nights were closing in, it never felt like the sky was sitting on my head like it had often felt in London after days of greyness when, at times, my yearning to see the sun became almost overwhelming.
Now a year on, we are settling into Melbourne life, as we both begin work and continue with our house and pet sitting assignments. My sister house-sat for three and a half years and so we followed her advice by joining a housesitting website and taking the time to write a very good profile, post lots of pictures and attach references. The combination of assignments from the website and from personal recommendation has resulted in us having bookings from March until mid-September. We have learnt to treat house sitting as a job which pays us the equivalent of rent and all utility bills while allowing us to live in much more luxurious surroundings than we would otherwise be able to afford. We also get the use of a fully equipped house. In return we look after the house, garden and pets, making sure the house is immaculate and the pets healthy and happy when we hand the property back. We send occasional updates to the owners with pictures of their pets accompanied by little anecdotes of their quirky behaviour. Owners love it because they don’t have to pay boarding fees and their pets get to stay in their familiar surroundings which is far less stressful for them than kennels or catteries.
Walking the dogs gives us plenty of exercise and we also get to explore the local area and do quality control on all the coffee shops. Woodleigh was a challenge though! He is a poodle/retriever cross, almost two years old and extremely high energy. We took him walking on the beach and in the bay every morning.
Even after two hours out, he still had plenty of energy. We liked nothing better than chasing the beach cleaning tractor, and terrorising wind surfers and joggers. He also liked to chase the little fish that frequent the shallows of the bay and shadows if we stopped for a coffee. Woodleigh lived in Ripponlea next to a synagogue that served a fundamentalist Hassidic population. This was my first experience of these people and I found their outfits quite intriguing. On their sabbath the men would dress in long satin coats white stockings and quite extraordinary large fur hats. On the other days, there was a constant coming and going of boys and men with long side curls dressed in black suits. While we were there the weather was still quite warm and we were still wearing shorts and sandals. On researching the origins of the men’s Hassidic outfits, I discovered that they derived from aristocratic Polish dress from the eighteenth century. It seems to me a very impractical form of dress for the Australian climate and wondered how the women coped with itchy hot wigs in 40-degree heat. The young boys would whiz along the footpath to and from the synagogue on little scooters or bicycles and at times I found myself having to jump out of the way. There were few women around and those I saw were dressed very conservatively and wore wigs or headscarves. Occasional a man spoke to Ian but I was completely ignored by all the men and boys – quite an uncomfortable experience.
Our next assignment was only a couple of kilometres away in Caulfield North but it felt like a world away. There we stayed in a beautifully restored 1880s house with a front veranda trimmed with iron lacework, leadlights, and a very traditional dining room. We looked after Ricky Martin, a black and white rescue cat who was recovering from a nasty accident and loved to spend all evening sitting on one or the other of us. Ian is allergic to cat hair and so I spent lots of time combing Ricky Martin to remove as much of the loose hair as possible.
In conversation I found that Beth, one of the owners, is a Scrabble player so a couple of weeks after they returned we met for a couple of games. She introduced me to the online version and now I must be very careful not to get too addicted or I’ll never get anything else done. While there we were buffeted around but a storm that was caused by weather affected by the cyclones up north. The garden looked quite a mess and Ian found himself up a ladder trimming a tree branch had been scraping against the roof all night in the sever winds.
We are now the other side of the river in Kew East, a wealthy area full of large houses and just down the road from where I went to secondary school. We have an elderly black Labrador called Halle, a cat called Kato and three goldfish called Scrambled, Eggs, and Toast to care for.
Halle eats anything, the more disgusting the better so that when walking her we are on constant alert for nasty stuff. If we fail in our quest, she grabs it and then runs away to gobble it down before we can stop her. She then pays us back by having the squits 24 hours later, the evidence of which she spreads artistically across the lawn in Morse code dots and dashes. Apart from that she is very sweet and gentle and spends each evening snoring and farting by the radiator. Then weather has been quite cold and our treat here is the spa pool on the back deck that we hop into three to four times a week with a cuppa or a g&t. It is a blissful experience whatever the weather. All our house sit hosts have been happy for us to have visitors and we have enjoyed paying back our friends and family members who have been so kind helping us to settle in, by inviting them to share meals with us.
We still have Alan but Ian is very happy to report that he has not slept in a camper-van for several months. Alan is a very handy vehicle to move all our things from one house sit to another but less handy for travelling around Melbourne and trying to park in small spaces. I must remind the parking fairy about Alan’s length and that he does not have power steering. However, we have become experts at using the Melbourne transport app PTV and my record number of journeys in a day is 11 – a mixture of buses, trains and trams.
House-sitting has enabled us to stay in Melbourne and live within our budget (rather diminished due to Brexit) without imposing on our friends and family. It has also enabled us to be more selective about what work we choose to do. Recently, I was approved for registration with an Australian counselling registration body and I have begun work at rooms within a private midwifery centre. Ian has started working with an agency that runs after school coding clubs so it is interesting juggling our house sitting duties with work commitments – especially on moving day. It always takes longer to clean the house and pack up than we think it will, but we have developed some short cuts that help. All our food and drink items have red or yellow dots so that it is easy to know what to grab from the fridge or cupboards. We never use peoples’ coffee pod machines so that we do not have to clean the machine or replace the pods. A few days before we are due to go we swap the bed linen and towels to ours so that we can wash theirs ready to remake the bed on the last day without worrying about getting washing dry. We can then wash our sheets at the next house. Thanks to my sis for that advice. We pack everything into Woolies’ or Coles’ shopping bags that are easy to pick up and pack into Alan. This includes our shoes and toiletries.
I have just managed to write a whole blog on house-sitting and select photos all containing a furry or hairy creature. To continue the theme, I am leaving you with this picture of a little visitor that appeared on the back veranda one afternoon – one of my favourite Australian creatures, a ring-tail possum. Even more special was that she had a baby in her pouch that ventured out and curled up with her.