This is in part enabled by the exhaustion of work and pregnancy, which means I am not tonight attending this event.

This, I should admit, is just one more thing in my list of good problems to have.

Pain Relief (in response to this post)

There was a classroom poster of all
the birds and their names,
mostly in English. The most
dangerous birds (to you) at the

top, the least were at the bottom.

I read it to avoid the other
readings (water safety,
fire safety, burning children and
drowning girls) and read it again.

I watched the wall and read it again.

Hot August night, under covers in
someone else’s room, someone else’s town
I could hear the sound of my own groaning.
After a while the birds came into focus:

beak, wings, breast, bearers of pain.

This is the New Zealand Falcon
and behind it, this, this is the Kakapo.
Sharp motion followed by dull ache.
The adults at the door in the dark.

I don’t remember what happened after that

to me or to the pain; it must have stopped.
We were miles from the city hospital.
The beating of the wings,
the scuffling of the claws.

I was ashamed of the metaphor

and of the pain. (Fire, water, learn.)
The birds retreated to the wall,
the poster superseded.
The lesson never got repeated.

School (in response to this post)

The playing surface is on fire,
the writing surface, under water.
The buildings raise a mountainside,
the bodies cowering as they died.

The angry kids assemble here
for snacks and quiet in lieu of play.
The future migrants walk the coast
for rusting hulks to use as boats.

The Phoenicians (in response to this post)

When Dido fell upon her sword
Anna took up historiography.
The burning waterfront was her idea:
a lie for cowardly lovers to read.

What the smoke and flames obscured
was a princess with her architects.
There wasn’t much time for what she planned:
the whole damn city underground.

• New things the puppy collective has tried today: solid food, barking, the play bow, sneak attacks from behind, grooming each other's faces. #
• Just now completing the first marking I've done since September. Less taxing than union work, I'll give it that. #
• Another working day. Lunchtime midwife appointment: Average Baby is also Transverse Baby, which explains why I'm not showing much @ 5 mos. #
• There is other news. Union colleague at nearby university died in a car accident on Friday. Have had unhappy task of telling other people. #
• In all sincerity I keep expecting an email from her in which she says it was all a misunderstanding, this having died thing. #
• I got to meet some really engaging and interesting people today. What a shame it was because of possible disestablishments. #
• I know I will feel compelled to sing in the voice of Cartman: http://bit.ly/cCAgdK #
• While I don't intend to provide commentary on every strip, this happened to more than 1 friend of mine more than once: http://bit.ly/dBaers #
• Visit from Ashburton Jay to see pups (she owns the sire). Opined that Jackie is the pick of the litter. This pleases me. #
• Starting to fret about finding the perfect homes for Tom and Rosie. 12 wks is the optimal time for them to go & they are 3 1/2 wks now. #
• How many of these boys are called Corey, Lisa? Seven. #
• Today I shall be attending Lyn's funeral and tomorrow I shall be in Wellington for an all-day meeting without egress. Melancholia. #
• Sharks, f*ck yeah: RT @TheOnion Universe Comes To Halt As Kid Flips Through First Shark Book http://onion.com/aJ8rQw #
• Thanks @MeganWegan & @hungrymama. I'm touched that @knedd is coming to the funeral today for moral support too. It will be alright. #
• As in Scrabble, so in life? RT @kittenypentland: Episiotomy always trumps epistemological scepticism. #
• Despite all the modern things of today's society, these reports aren't reading themselves, nor, sadly is my report writing itself. #
• Confidential to Eddie: that rug contains a significant amount of felted dog hair. Cut out the middleman and chew your own coat instead. #
• Here I am, working from home, with @knedd opposite, online on his day off. We could be the Darby and Joan of telecommuting. #
• In Soviet Russia, branch report writes you! Fortunately, this is not Soviet Russia. Take that, challenging administrative task! #
• Perfect lunch courtesy of @knedd and the Sockburn shops: falafel, fresh up and a fruit pie. Now to put on our funereal weeds. #
• Well, that is the events of the day taken care of. It was okay. #
• After a melancholy sort of afternoon, where better to recur than the mid-to-late 90s? (I used crash parties and Maseratis and I was evil.) #
• Arthur and Millie are snoozing either side of me. Snoozing, paddling with their back legs and farting up a storm. #
• Airplane seatbelt fastens below babby. Just. No extenders for you, little one! #
• Outside of usual work environment, suddenly feel v pregnant. Ability to stride decisively compromised. #
• So yeah, I'll be in Wgtn all day without opportunity to see any of you. Solidarity forever will have to do. #
• Morning tea time. Holla back, yo. #
• While the business of the meeting is confidential, I can reveal there were delicious cheese scones at morning tea. Thanks, labour movement! #
• Directed by splendid deputy secretary to @mojoinvincible for coffee. Sorted for l'apres-midi. #
• The @knedd says it's been raining horizontally in Sockburn. I may have to parachute back in this evening. #
• Is there any evidence beyond the word of Joyce the Minister that there really are 6000+ tertiary quals offered in NZ? Where's that fig from? #
• Blimey; it's just possible I'm in the best place. RT @CHCHWeather: Christchurch weather data 2:00 PM 9.4°C 81 pct 9.7 km/h S #
• On way to airport. Flights north being cancelled. Will I make it back to Sockburn or nay? #
• Looks like flights are go. #
• Thanks lovely tweeps for all the offers of transport and accommodation! About to board. #
• Things to do nowish: set up show trolley and groom the dogs atop it (one by one), de-poo the lawn, photograph the one-month-old puppies. #
• Clarification: not going to a dog show, but the trolley raises the dog being groomed above the level at which the others can jump upon it. #
• Tom's teeth are cutting, while Jackie's are visible as buds in the gum. Playful face-gumming will soon be painful face-biting. #
• It's amazing how much cleaner one's house feels when one knows one's dogs have all had their bums trimmed. #toomuchdoggyinformation #
• My aunt rang this morning and asked how I am. 5 1/2 mos along, I said. Well, said she, Praise the Lord for that. Yes, I said. Yes indeed. #
• Rosie at One Month http://flic.kr/p/7KhF1g #
• Tom at One Month http://flic.kr/p/7KmACE #
• Jackie at One Month http://flic.kr/p/7KmAzU #
• Congratulations @annettle, @jsrnz and Willow! (And be sustained by the fact that this is the bit your baby won't remember.) #
• The sun is burning the morning dew off the grass. This looks like a good day to take the puppies outside for the first time! #
• We also need today to spend the remainder of our wedding vouchers before they expire. #goodproblemstohave #
• Puppies' verdict: outside not so grate akshually. Much happier when transferred back from exterior to interior pen. #

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I am struck by how my theme is largely stories about my family and my ancestors.  Against the big themes I keep offering the small, or rather, intertwining the small with the big.  I’m not sure why, but don’t suppose interpretation is particularly my responsibility in this regard.  However, it may worth mentioning, with regard to what appears below, that I find images and stories from Pompeii too upsetting to consider directly.  It’s a particular quirk of mine that has persisted since childhood, when it was part of a more generalised terror of disasters.  (Gosh but I was easy to wind up in those days.  I must remember that when I come to write on Giovanni’s more recent post about starting school.)

Human Terrain (in response to this post)

On the back road from Karamea
the bobby calves were gathered
muzzles at the wire
using cows for cover.

After a day of driving
Aeneas started to waver
lacking the stomach for Latium
tasting the air of Hades.

He’d gone down and down and down
saw his wife, father and lover
without a thought of the meat dust
on the road from Karamea.

Pompeii (in response to this post)

Plaster, poured on Tonks Street, might
trace the short road down to the shore
and thus pollute North Brighton but
not show us much of where she died.

Her trace got left us somewhere else;
a short life and a briefer death.
Three artefacts to crack the heart
put incompletely back together.

One family photo: there she is,
a fair-haired, round-kneed, chubby child.
One story: she had rheumatic fever.
Her sister carried her on her back.

One tree: the weeping silver birch
whose roots protrude, whose branches show
the still site of her unmarked grave
abortive tale with seasonal shade.

The puppies are a one-month-old delight today. The only regret I have is the limited amount of time in the day there is to spend with them, narrowed as it is two-fold by my working schedule and their sleeping schedule, each of which is extensive. They are making a good fist — or rather, face-full — of solid food and Tom, physically the most precocious, is already cutting teeth.

I have now the task of finding two homes for two out of the three. I am trying to approach this matter with all the systematic organisation of a professional person, but it is trying nonetheless. As the señor puts it, while I may be well-suited intellectually to breeding dogs, emotionally I am not well-made for its important facets, like selling those I’ve bred. The fact of capacity helps; one cannot keep all the world’s puppies in one’s spare room, not least when that space is soon-enough to be commandeered by a different kind of baby.

I take comfort from the fact that everyone I know with Norwich Terriers started as a would-be owner approaching a breeder, and that from such chance meetings wonderful homes are made. I am hopeful that through the various networks of inquiry I am exploring, and with a little help from my friends, the perfect match between pup and owner will be found.

Until that match is made — and I have at least two months to make it — there are plenty of domestic pleasures to enjoy with the little hairy ones. There is, for the pedigree-obsessed breeder, comparisons that go back in time. You can see here, for example, the puppies’ dam Fern at one month old herself, just under three years ago. She is the poppet clutched on the right of the two.

The hard core of the closeness and conflict that has characterised ever since her relationship with Edwin her litter brother is not necessarily on display in those too-innocent faces, even if was already well-demonstrated at the food and water bowl.

And here is the pups’ dam’s elder sister, Evie of identical pedigree to Fern, first pup of my breeding and true companion to this house for more than half of my occupancy here.

As they grow bigger, mobile and bolshie it’s easier to forget the vulnerability of their early days, even as I search these images for the history of their temperament. Today I groomed the adults’ coats porch-side while the puppies slept in their pen. I don’t suppose this was my childhood vision of an exciting life, but in such activities these days I find good, good times.

At five months pregnant, I am somewhat in the thick of such experiences myself; hence using my own webpages rather than posting a comment on-site to consider the matter.  My impression has been that conversations around fertility and natality fall into two broad general groups.

The first of these is perhaps less problematic: when one is the interlocutor of someone with whom one shares a relationship of equal status and intimacy, and in which that person is making a genuine, well-meant inquiry.  The equality of such relationships acts as a check or a balance against inappropriate or invasive questioning, and often means that anything asked will be expressed with relative tact.  This can encompass quite a wide group of people.  In my life, it includes the señor and our close friends and family, but also people with whom we interact in a wider circle: some of our workmates, even some of our acquaintances.  When I miscarried our first pregnancy, it was of tremendous help and support to know from all kinds of people that they had been through the equivalent experience of their own, for example, and we were fortunate in that no-one who shared this with us offered any pat responses or advice.  This was a sustaining, widespread kindness.

It is the second group, I think, that can be the source of frustration.  These are people for whom talking about fertility and natality is part of the general phatic communion, and who will engage on these issues not with the intention of sincere exchange, but rather as a way of passing the time, or of opening up the conversation to them sharing their own opinions, which tend to general social platitudes or judgements.  These kind of exchanges happen, of course, in so many areas of life and society and are part of that process of social evolution whereby we feel interested in other people’s business as examples of general social and even moral phenomena.  Where the person turning our lives and experiences into grist for the mill of small talk has higher status than us (bosses, for example, or older relatives), or is a stranger to us, it’s a galling experience.  This doesn’t make it any less widespread.

So what do I do, when people casually inquire or comment about intimate matters (What names have you chosen?  Have you found out the sex — oh, you shouldn’t have done that; Of course, you’ll want to get rid of the dogs; How is your husband going to support you both?) and I want to put some distance between myself and the question?  I am using a combination of demurral and flippancy as my response.  It’s risky, and it’s skirts the edge of rudeness, but it’s the best signal I can give that I’m uncomfortable with my current gravidity being dredged through a phatic driftnet.

What names have I chosen? Family names, or, alternatively, Jesús the Gay Baby (the latter best not used at work).  Have we found out the sex? Yes, we are intractably nosey and like to know everything.  Of course we’ll want to get rid of the dogs; in fact no: when the baby’s born, we intend to shut her in the living room with the dogs and come back in three weeks (curiously, no-one has taken offence at that response).  How is your husband going to support you both? Same way he’s always done — his income, time and labour in conjunction with mine.  (The señor’s response to this is blunter, to the effect that he’s the one with the Sugar Momma in this relationship.)

If I feel strong effrontery, which can be influenced by context and my momentary feelings as well as the question, I mention my daughter’s ghost.  When first we told people about the pregnancy, I didn’t want its predecessor forgotten.  Are you excited? Yes, particularly since we lost our first pregnancy last winter.  This has proved most effective at separating out my conversationalists into those who are asking genuinely and those for whom it’s small talk.  The latter, I infer, are the ones with no further questions.

You can see that in my feelings of being judged, I feel entitled to judge right back, and I acknowledge that these judgements are subjective and may at times be inaccurate.  Small talk and polite conversation is a minefield, or maybe a battlefield, full of feints and parrying.  The habit of social judgement is long ingrained in many of us.  I offset these challenges by refusing to be personally or lastingly offended by much of what people say.  This is a hard habit to develop for a sensitive person, but it’s been worth it for me.  Whenever frustrating conversation can be recalibrated as an example of a social trend, it loses some of its power to pique.  And of course, the persistent inquiry and judgement will never stop, not now that I’m bringing into the world an individual who will be both emblematic of the future (a taxpayer and consumer in the making!) at the same time as her existent is viewed as a subjective personal choice on my part (many of you, I’m sure, remember Prebble’s “If you breed ‘em, feed ‘em” in Parliament as the nadir of this kind of view and its expression).

In many ways, planning a wedding was excellent preparation for this whole experience.  My engagement was the time during which all manner of individuals revealed a surprisingly passionately-held range of opinions about what the señor and I should do during our secular civil ceremony, from not doing it at all to wearing full bridal white because It’s Your Special Day.  (The amount of boat-rocking in the planning caused by having neither flowers nor professional photographer was quite something.)  It was my first time in the head-winds of unexpected opinion since my student days, when the social evil of my being “an eternal student” was somewhat offset by the specificity of my thesis topic.  The close following-on of our second pregnancy to our wedding has given the current conversational whirlwind the quality of dejà-vû, or, if I predict the future accurately, the eternal return.

Yet, at some level, I don’t mind about any of this, in a way that just a few years ago I would have minded profoundly and bitterly.  The pleasures of privacy during my long spinsterhood were always offset by the low-level suspicion of strangers, for whom a single person of any stripe is not easily classified, and the undue, unnecessary public validation of the decision to marry and breed comes with the cost of the loss of some of that privacy.  None of these situations is ideal, but they are real.  In our small talk we come at each other with a mixture of hope and fear, continually sounding out who is an ally and who is a threat to our views of the world.  We classify, we revise our classifications, we opine seriously or idly.  I carry the weight of my unborn child, and go home to my husband and our dogs.  These things are mine, and his, and hers.  They are material, they are actual, they resist , for the most part, the stumpy barbs of passing scrutiny.

• Someone in this house has been drinking, singing and using powertools, all at once. Fast times in suburbia! #
• Facebook suggests that @francesrosey is okay. Good news! #
• Did you know there is such a thing as an extended belly bar so you can keep your navel piercing while pregnant? Nothin’ to me; just sayin’. #
• A most difficult union day, redeemed by first pic of colleague w her tiny bebe. #
• Felicitous wishes to all who battle in the name of #jam today. #
• These are not the new puppies. This is their dam Fern, and Eddie, born three years ago today! http://flic.kr/p/C5YQG #
• Contemplating one’s navel is much more interesting when you know there’s someone right behind it. #
• Much of today was spent supporting people who had been given notice. This is also what I did on Monday and what I will do tomorrow too. #
• Unexpected outcome of TVNZ6 now included with TelstraClear Sky: seeing one of my vets, Deborah, on Animal Academy. #
• What I’ve been doing this week, and why I’m working at home today: http://bit.ly/diMdQL #
• To all my Twitter Toms whose name was stolen for my dog pup, said pup can now lift his head and look at things with his little blue eyes. #
• A number of my former students are JAL ground staff. I’m sure they won’t be tempted by this: http://bit.ly/bDDbfm #
• Feeling like a zombie – the “urgh, brains” kind, not the cocktail kind. Have moved the puppies into the lounge in the hope of perking up. #
• Ever since the narrator in Novel About My Wife mocked the Aust/NZ tendency to say “lounge” over “living room”, I have felt self-conscious. #
• The garage rang about my car & its WOF. The news was neither good nor cheap. At least they didn’t admonish me excessively for neglect. #
• Car bill not as bad as feared, tho’ still hefty. Brakes good for the next 100K km. Windscreen to be replaced Monday. I will have WOF yet! #
• Moved the puppies to a bigger pen today. This led to much wailing: everything was far away! This led to their first experience of pat-pats. #
• Snoozing in the living room earlier today: http://flic.kr/p/7Hu9XH #
• At three weeks old the puppies are starting to play together. Jackie wobbles up to Tom & Rosie and gums the heck out of their faces & backs. #
• Rosie is the most aloof to trends, but even she is persuaded that this gumming lark might be worth a go. Good times with no teeth! #
• I also have this problem with cards and, some might say, life in general: http://bit.ly/bMbKgu #
• Babycenter.com’s 22-week-old fetus looks serene and genteel: http://bit.ly/cBV99Z. My daughter is more of a sideways-lying headbanger. #
• I think I probably shouldn’t read any more blogs in which a newborn is parented. They make my gut fearful and my head explody. #
• The babyblogs frighten me because of the subtext that if I don’t ASSERT MYSELF during and after labour, something terribly will happen. #
• Something more terrible than incorrectly using an adverb in place of an adjective, what’s more. #
• Thanks to your sustaining tweets, I shall continue on my path of analogising most pregnancy matters to my experience of terrier husbandry. #
• … and now the pregnancy touts and hacks come trickling in. Thank you, no. #followthis #
• Three Fatties at Three Weeks: http://flic.kr/p/7HJfuC #
• So much curry. Also, happy birthday harvestdad! Also, clearly I cannot leave the Black Caps unsupervised. #
• Puppies having a marathon feed once more. Confidential to Fern: I am starting them on solid food tomorrow. #
• Googlage suggets “bommyknocker” features in The Hungry Giant series by Joy Cowley. #
• Tales from my mother at dinner: her obstetrician was painting his house when she started labour with me; he arrived spattered in paint. #
• Three Fatties Feeding (video): http://flic.kr/p/7HG1RZ #
• The rest of the dogs are coming home within the quarter hour. Very very excited. #
• The momentous Solid Food Day has interested only Tom so far; Rosie and Jackie preferred to sleep through its arrival. #
• The dogs are home! Suddenly the house has become noisier, but only at knee level. Puppies closed off in a pen behind two toddler gates. #
• I look ridiculous today. Black tracky-daks worn very low-slung, woven orange/white Thai scarf tied around protruberance, long pink t-shirt. #
• This is what happens when you buy maternity clothes for wearing to work. It’s a good thing my car has no WOF and I can’t leave the house. #
• Millie is beside herself: there are puppies in the house and she is not allowed to parent them. Will she react the same to the harvestbaby? #

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Indeed, when I first viewed this house at its open home, it was precisely its unfashionable colours and structures to which I was attracted: exterior partially clad in Hardiplank, interior joinery the same colour as the dark aluminium window frames.  There was a uniformity to its construction and presentation that pleased me; no-one had taken much of a renovator’s go at it, save for new wallpaper and carpets, some new fixtures in the bathroom and a bright green benchtop in the small kitchen.  I treated it as a gallery space for my posters, paintings and piano, and cheerfully offset the tones by-and-large tasteful and neutral with the primary colours of my Stuff.

However, Thing Fall Apart.  Incremental increases in the volume of dogs over a five-year period have not been kind to carpets or porch posts, and the advent of the señor saw the conversion of the small spare room — previously a genteel sort of space with a single bed, a collection of children’s books and the late-afternoon sun — into a fully-fledged Man Cave, featuring all the accoutrements of a gamer-epicure.  Science fiction and fantasy volumes competed with Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson for space on a roughly-constructed bookshelf, and pieces of computer hardware piled up under a print of Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, the latter (mine) perhaps the single remnant of the room’s former state.  This notwithstanding, it was the señor, and not your humble diarist, who first suggested that the Man Cave could readily be converted into a nursery for the impending harvestbaby.

This conversation we had during our first pregnancy, in the shadow of whose early end we returned to our prior wine-drinking, paperback-stockpiling, mess-making habits.  It arose again, in a mini-version of the eternal return, not long after our eleven-week scan late last year, with the unexpected result that, come new year, we had committed to some repainting and refurbishing.  From here, small project has beget small project with the length and irreversibility of an Old Testament genealogy.

Before we could convert to a nursery the Cave, we needed to do something about all the books.  An obvious choice was to hang shelves in the larger spare room, which had spent several months as a rather sad repository for the excess of Stuff not contained elsewhere in the house.  Before the shelves could be built and hung, it seemed politic to paint the larger spare room.  This was the first task we completed.

After the large spare room was painted, the señor concluded that it would also be advisable to paint the dark joinery, whose historical relicry now seemed out of place with the off-white, cod-patriotic colour we’d chosen for the walls (Lyttelton Quarter, for those of you playing with the Dulux colour chart at home.)  When eventually I was persuaded by this argument, it quickly became clear there was no turning back.  The purchase of a tin of Raurimu-tint felt unexpectedly monumental.  Another feature of the appeal of the dark joinery had once been its exact match to my grandmother’s Spreydon flat, but nearly five years after her death, it seemed no longer timely to cling to such a resemblance.

What if, I said to the señor, we moved into the living room for the puppies’ delivery and early days?  Then we could paint the master bedroom and hall without interference at night from lingering fumes, all while the other dogs were away from home.  By this reasoning were most of our hallway and cupboard doors removed and our erstwhile sleeping space converted into the soothing blend of grey and off-white it now sports.  ”It looks so — modern!” was my explanation upon seeing it completed, a moment in which my attempt to detach from the aesthetics of interior decoration was temporarily overwhelmed by my inner nine-year-old.

Following this there has been the matter of the bed that broke when we dismantled it.  Our growing feeling that we might have ditched the wrong bed when the señor moved in seemed to be confirmed by plastic slat-holding brackets that had achieved the consistency of wax and snapped when the slats were removed.  Having a material reason for the previously occasional falling-out of a slat while we were sleeping was something of a relief to me, since it superseded my “too fat for this bed!” theorem.  It led to a more immediate problem, however; one that the señor eventually resolved with the purchase of a mains-powered drill (more powerful than its dinkier battery-powered alternative) and two boxes of button-head screws.  For the first time in memory we slept through the night, unencumbered by the responsibility of multiple dogs (who will shortly return) or the sporadic interruption of slats gone rogue.

There is still a hallway that needs its topcoat, numerous cupboards without doors, the dark joinery as yet unpainted in the larger spare room (into which the puppies have moved, for now) and the proto-nursery currently a dark impassable space filled with boxes and furniture.  The residual fear, as the señor has it, is that when everything is finally unloaded from that room — facilitating at last the conversion whose planning has been the root of all this other painting and decorating — it will be revealed to be a repository for far more furniture than can reasonably be housed anywhere else.  We may yet have to do the thing that few people in my family have successfully done: throw some Stuff out.  Meanwhile, however, we are living in a space that is changing in the way our lives are now changing: new form, new colour, new cladding.  It is not at all surprising that the anticipation of a birth should lead to a domestic transformation.  What is surprising for me, however, is how much of an adventure this renovatory process has been and how well I am tolerating living in this halfway house of DIY.

Her most recently-recorded visit was to Whitby, whose charms merited multiple posts.  I delighted in the images accompanying the narrative, since they reminded me anew of my own journey to Whitby — like GB Jay, from York — in the northern summer of 2000.  Since I was travelling in high sunshine rather than rain and snow, this made something of a difference to my experiences, but many things were the same.  I too headed straight for the Abbey and marvelled both at the ruins and the view, the former set in motion during the dissolution of the monasteries, and, like other northern monuments, given a general gutting-for-resources (in this case, stone) by locals in subsequent years.

On the day I was there, the churchyard surrounding the Abbey was being excavated, as a number of Anglo-Saxon graves had been discovered beneath the medieval burial site.  Excited archaeologists and their students were working hard in the sun, and although the graves themselves were sectioned off from the public, a temporary exhibit had been put up explaining what they were doing and what had already been learned about burial customs from an earlier time as a result of these excavations.  In town, later, I looked at relics of a more recent age: Victorian mourning jewellery carved in jet.  One large brooch bore the legend “Ethel”, but sadly, at forty-eight pounds, was beyond my student means.  I talked to the shop owner for some time too.  Like the guides at the Cook Museum, he was kindly disposed towards New Zealanders, particularly in his case since a young man from the East Coast, with experience carving bone and pounamu, had worked with him in jet carving for a while.

Perhaps a month or so later I was home from my first significant voyage abroad, distracted from my re-entry to winter and the hard yards at the end of my thesis by my new puppy.  One day we were sitting on the bed when Arthur leaned over and, with the most delicate of movements and the sharpest of teeth, first nosed and then severed from its silver casing the small jet pendant with which I had departed Whitby.  I was disappointed, but not inconsolably so; I loved my dog more than my jewellery.

I was fortunate on those travels to have had the opportunity to explore the east coast of England at some of its wilder points: not only at Whitby but also in Suffolk further south, where midsummer beach-goers still sat with their backs to the sea because of the wind, and my aunt and uncle pointed out to me along the route various spaces of sky and sea where cliffs and sometimes whole villages had once stood.  They lived just north of the county border in Caister-on-Sea, where a digger had just finished the work of transporting back up the North Sea coast the sand that gets blown south every winter, and whose presence raised the shoreline an easy five metres or more.

The wildness of these littoral places seemed to be wilfully nullifed by the seaside kitsch that surrounded them, which in turn was surrounded by what in New Zealand we might call “history”.  This history could be physically intact — cathedrals, homes, pubs even — or in ruin.  Either way, it required an act of imagination that seemed of a different kind from the one people spending their everyday lives in these places might routinely make, although this too is an assumption, and perhaps a bogus one.  The privilege of living somewhere for a long time might be the privilege of taking its material culture for granted.

• Rosie Atop Jackie: initiating the puppy pile. http://flic.kr/p/7EwMWe #
• Tom stretched out, unaware he could be reading about homes for sale if his eyes were open. http://flic.kr/p/7EwN22 #
• First day o’ lectures: a bright sunshiny day, the campus is filled with good-looking students & the streets of Ilam look like a car rally. #
• I am keeping up okay but feel a little like the Venus of Willendorf in a fetching top and skirt. #
• I don’t miss the absence of skateboards & their riders over summer. More than ever, I feel convinced one of ‘em is going to bowl me over. #
• Struggling to get through the afternoon. Finding this strangely soothing: http://bit.ly/aJkDfZ #
• Finnmar sent me an email checking I wasn’t too hot, seeing as we were talking about our hot dogs. (Dog people are the best people.) #
• It’s 30 degrees at 5 o’clock. Pleased @knedd had the foresight to take the heatpad out of the puppy basket this afternoon. #
• Have given up attempts at secrecy entirely and have started talking about the baby with her very own gendered pronoun #
• Thank you everyone for your kind wishes, ponies and poems. Please keep the fearfully inspiring name suggestions coming! #
• Ah, figure skating: where the songs from Phantom of the Opera are still a legitimate expression of the athlete’s highest art. #
• Esteemed colleague has the plague. I have relocated to higher ground, above the miasma. #
• Melting! RT @CHCHWeather: Christchurch weather data 3:00 PM 30.9°C 26 pct #
• On the upside: not Qld in December with morning sickness. #
• The hair & make-up of the solo figure-skaters is very Cool Girls From School c. 1989. #
• Hurrah for Mao Asada! The Onion article was right. #
• Last of the community ed classes I’ve been teaching tonight. Great group – sorry it’s ended. #
• The colleague with whom I’ve worked closely this summer had her baby this morning, 6 weeks before full-term. Baby’s fine, she’s fine #phew #
• Still, it’s been an anxious week & apart from the strangeness of her absence, there’s been all the worry for her & the little one. #onlooker #
• Getting bigger, getting bigger; Tom’s eyes are the first to start opening. http://flic.kr/p/7FA4EM #
• Hot days demand Cold Chisel, with Mr. Barnes working at the top of his youthful range. ♫ http://blip.fm/~lod9k #
• Tom-the-puppy’s eyes had started to open last night. I hope the bitches will follow suit over the weekend. #
• I am tweeting about puppies because there is quite a whelming amount of business today of which I must take care. #solidarityetc #
• Chilli hot chocolate from Xocolatl turns out to be an excellent cure for reflux of pregnancy. #
• Is there something you would like to know in advance of the weekend? You could ask me at formspring if you wish: http://bit.ly/7sRZoE #
• The eyes of a puppy open like a zip, from a keyhole in the corner nearest the nose to the final outer edge, around 36 hours later. #
• They are unfocused blue orbs and regard the world with languor rather than curiosity. #
• Tom’s eyes are all but unzipped, Jackie’s just starting and Rosie (the fiercest feeder, the mobile boss) still fully closed. #
• Thank you for the delightful formspring questions. Answers are now up: http://bit.ly/7sRZoE #
• Dear Black Caps: I got hurt feelings #cricket #
• Three pepperpots at rest: http://flic.kr/p/7FPckk #
• Power feeding on film: http://bit.ly/9pAEb8 #
• http://twitpic.com/15hv4t – This time a fortnight ago … well. This time today – well! #
• The sun is shining, the sky is clear and it’s not 30 degrees. This is looki.ng to be a good day #
• Everyone is happier now I’ve cut the puppies’ nails. This is the only time in a NT’s life I as their owner can do this without starting WW3. #
• harvestmother brought Arthur round for a quick visit. One full section survey + marking later, and everything was deemed acceptable. #mahboy #
• It is likely a failure of my imagination that I have never until today associated curling with delightful young Chinese women. #
• The commentators on the Chinese winning the women’s curling bronze: 200 curlers in China and one curling rink. The team is based in Canadia. #
• Surprised by how many people I know with family in Chile. Not sure where @francesrosey is in her travels; hope she & her relatives are okay. #

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Conversation with my own colleagues has revealed a small variety of questions and queries and “oh, I didn’t know that moments” about very young puppies, so in the spirit of self-indulgence and public information, I thought I would make a modest list of Facts! about this topic.  It’s knowledge, bro.*

• Puppies are not only blind at birth but also deaf.  Their ears start to open at around the same time as their eyes, which is any time after ten days old.  This process I described on Twitter thus:
  • The eyes of a puppy open like a zip, from a keyhole in the corner nearest the nose to the final outer edge, around 36 hours later. #
  • They are unfocused blue orbs and regard the world with languor rather than curiosity. #
• When a puppy is born, its rear legs aren’t yet fully functioning.  A puppy stands up for the first time on all fours sometime after the first week of life, but the action is so wobbly at first as to be indistinguishable from general flailing.
• Easy movement on all four legs takes longer for puppies from the short-legged breeds, including Norwich Terriers.  This doesn’t seem to slow the puppies down too much, as they have a proto-mobile action that owes something both to seals and to breaststrokers.**
• Despite their limited range of senses, newborn puppies are not mute.  Even healthy puppies have a range of expressive wails that summons their dam.  My experience has been that dog puppies are much quicker to use these than bitches.
• Some puppies make barking sounds very early; others don’t.  My younger dogs seemed to learn to bark by copying the older dogs.    There is a point in the life of a juvenile dog — at a few months old, perhaps — at which its voice “breaks” and its little yappy bark becomes deeper.  Sometimes this happens in an instant, much to the surprise of the dog!
• Young puppies nails grow rapidly and need trimming so they don’t catch on each other or their dam while feeding.  See a further point on this here.
• When born, Norwich Terrier puppies’ ears are flat and on the side of their heads.  By the end of the first day, their ears “pop out” and will later move around to the top of the head (although sometimes they drop, and then re-prick, as they get bigger).
• Red Norwich Terriers are born with a grizzle coating of dark guard hairs, which makes them look dark brown.  These hairs will later die and can be plucked out, painlessly, to reveal the red coat beneath.
• Black and tan puppies have a sleeker coat at birth with less-obvious guard hairs.  When born, they are often almost completely black, with the tan on their faces and legs appearing much later in a manner similar to a receding hair- or tide-line.
• One reason that very young puppies often yawn while being handled is the way in which all dogs use yawning to calm themselves or others.  Too much handling is stressful for puppies unless they are being handraised (ie, without their dam).
• Nursing puppies are surprisingly tidy as the dam both stimulates their excretory organs by licking them, then cleans up after them.  Once the puppies start to take solid food, things work by themselves and the responsibility for cleaning up falls to the breeder!

Since not everyone is interested in breeding trivia, let me conclude with a slideshow.

* A hat-tip, as ever, to Stephen for this phrase.

** A puppy that can’t stand because of a shallow-sprung chest is called a swimmer and requires intervention, usually taping of the legs, to get it up and going.  These puppies don’t always thrive. Fortunately I have no experience of this — which means that my explanation may be incorrect.