A serious case of empty-nest syndrome descended on our house last year. We have three boys who are boys no longer and have flown to various parts of the world. Time zones need to be checked before WhatsApp calls.
The house is quiet and even tidy on occasion. No longer does half the underage rugby team descend on the kitchen on Saturday after the game and strip the fridge like a biblical plague of locusts. It was strange for a while to put food in the fridge and still find it there the next day. No longer did we wake up on Sunday morning to find someone asleep on the couch in the sitting room. I never thought I’d miss that as much as I do.
We decided the antidote was to empty the nest even further by taking a year’s career break and going back to Australia, where we had lived in our 20s. We called it our gap year. A neighbour suggested we try pet-sitting while abroad. After some research we decided that this might be feasible for some of our year away.
And so we set off for Perth in Western Australia. With a population of 2.45 million, it’s one of the world’s most isolated major cities (surrounded on one side by the Indian ocean and on the other by vast, dry outback; the nearest city is 2,000km away).
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Over WhatsApp, we secured our first dog-sitting position. We’d be looking after Molly, who belonged to a young family in the Perth suburbs. They explained that Molly had recently had hip surgery, so she could only go for short walks.
This was our introduction to the way Perth people treat their pets. Nearly every dog we looked after in the next year was on medication for dry skin, getting vitamins for bone density issues, or supplements for joint pain. One dog was on anti-depressants. We quickly discovered Perth people really love their pets, treat them as if they were children, and often refer to them as fur babies.
On one evening walk along the Swan river, I spotted a man cycling with a small dog in his basket. The pampered pooch was wearing a tiny little helmet that looked like the top cut from a boiled egg.
Our next pet-sit was with Frankie, a greyhound – a breed known as lean, mean racing machines. Frankie was a greyhound in name for sure, but that was not his true calling. He suffered from sore paws and corns. To save poor Frankie’s feet, he had to wear little booties before his morning stroll. Trying to put on these booties became the bane of my life, as with one delft flick of his paw, he would send the dog shoe flying over the neighbours’ hedge. More annoying still was when we returned from our stroll to find that only three of the booties had come back with us.
The dogs on our next petsit did not have booties, but they did have matching dressing gowns. When Pepples and Chloe, who both looked like a King Charles crossed with a poodle, went out in the morning to run around the park like headless chickens, they also rolled in the grass. So they were wet from the dew when they returned to the house, hence the dressing gowns. All they needed was Frankie’s booties and they would have been ideal pets in the Playboy mansion.
We always got plenty of instructions, from a single page (laminated of course) for the budgie, to a 30-page folder for the others
We were glad our next pet, a budgie called Pip, required no walking or clothing. She would freely fly around the house during the day and return to sleep in her cage at night. Well, so the owners told us, before they set off for two weeks’ skiing in Japan. All went reasonably well until Pip refused to fly into her cage for the night. It is quite difficult to argue with a budgie. It reminded me of when our children were small and I used to try and cajole them to go to bed. Unlike Pip, at least they didn’t try to bite me.
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Drawing on my years of experience as a parent, I decided give up and left Pip sitting on the top of the cage. At some ungodly hour I heard her flying down the hall in a panic. I left the cage in the hall and eventually she went inside. I covered it with her cloth which had stars on the inside, so Pip could look up at night and dream of galaxies far away, I suppose.
We always got plenty of instructions, from a single page (laminated of course) for the budgie, to a 30-page folder for the others. The instructions for the budgie included for us not to wear perfume, and only cooking with the budgie-friendly saucepans (They are sensitive to certain coatings). According to those instructions, budgies have extremely sensitive sensory receptors, and environmental factors are the most common cause of deaths of pet birds. I suppose that’s why they took budgies down the mines – there’s not much perfume down there. I was worried about cooking an Indian curry one evening, but Pip survived.
Our admiration, or something akin to it, for the way Perth people treat their pets was reinforced when we went to look after Henry, a beautiful big labradoodle. In the kitchen were two large fridges; one was for human food and one was for Henry’s. You see, Henry liked variety. He wouldn’t eat the same food two days running, so there had to be a number of options each evening. I have to admit to a bit of jealousy over his stance when I was having leftovers on a Tuesday night.
Culinary choices for pets continued into the local pubs that featured a doggie menu. Here your furry friend could opt for the chicken, beef or duck, for $20. The kids’ menu was cheaper.
But Perth’s humans also get to enjoy their eating and drinking, thanks to the outdoor spaces which are central to life there. One of the major perks of petsitting was seeing inside other people’s beautiful houses. My favourite place in all these homes was the outside dining area, where I’d sit each morning drinking coffee. There is something wonderful about needing to find your sunglasses before you can drink your morning coffee. One house overlooked the Swan river and we sometimes saw dolphins swimming by, and the place had a telescope to get a closer view.
They also took barbecuing to another level. One dog owner was very proud of his ceramic barbecue, which meant he could be up and running quite quickly. At that stage, I’d usually be halfway through my second box of matches back home. He didn’t use the humble matchstick either. Instead, he deployed a canister which was like a mini flamethrower, and after that a specialised air blower for fanning the flames. The temperature shot up to 400 degrees in minutes. I had to just wave the prawns in the vicinity of the barbecue and they were cooked.
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One of our favourite houses had an outdoor covered section, which the husband had turned into a bar. It had two beer taps, each connected to a 27-litre kegs. We spent many pleasant evenings listening to Lisa O’Neill and Mick Flannery on the Bluetooth speaker while pouring beers and playing darts. My wife, a novice, threw the darts like she was trying to spear a wild animal, this unorthodox method giving her a surprising win rate.
Perhaps it was apt for Perth. This unorthodox, surprising city, with beautiful beaches, full of warm, friendly people – many of whom really adore their pets – certainly hit the bullseye for us.
As we head home to Ireland, I look back on our adventurous year, glad that we took the chance to interrupt the comfortable rhythm of our lives. We shook the snowglobe and returned with a head full of possibilities (and a little bit of dog hair to brush off our clothes).
Fergal MacDermott (60) is married with three sons and three grandchildren. He is back living in Ballincollig, Cork, where he works as an automation engineer, while also pondering the next chapter.
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