Byline: Ruby Smith

Fake monks are the opposite of socks. Next thing you know there are two of them, and where they come from nobody knows. Round Marital HQ there’s a mustard-rockin’ posse of booze-breathing Chinese chubsters in gaiters and mala beads, their anti-chakras oozing venal benevolence, their eyes aglint and peeled for rubes sweating backpacks and elephant shorts. Since I’m too gutless to run after every policeman yelling, “Stop! Thief!” I’ve taken it upon myself to dash after those other grinning fakirs bawling “Fake Monk! Fake Monk!” They speed to a trot, head down, suddenly late for nefarious fake-monkly doings down the “pagoda”. Despite my verbal shoe slinging, they’re infuriatingly smiley regardless, as though being chased through Psah Kandal by an unhinged asthmatic harpie in plush Kermit slippers and bulging floral PJs is exactly the kind of ignominious cross a super pious holyman has to bear if he wants dibs on a magic cloud when his mortal wheel has turned its last.

I also like to taunt those Pinoy card sharks who routinely nab me in Aeon. One recent Sunday when I’d gone 20 minutes too long without food and hydration after a Daiso tat marathon, a beaming and becapped Filipina fraudster made a beeline for me just as I was shunting a tray of sushi into my jittery maw. No-one, least of all a tubby catholic poker cheat in acid wash shorts should ever, ever come between me and my food. “Waaauuuw”, she said, grinning theatrically, oblivious to my invisible force field of “fuck off” just ahead of her, “I larpyourherestyle”. Actually, she only got as far as “I larpyourherest-”. As soon as she was in eyeshot I withered her with a powerful “begone, shyster” glarebeam. I knew she knew I knew. She careened away between the tables like a pinball, if it was wearing one of those inexplicable moustache t-shirts.

These feckless hustlers get on my tit end. But I guess at least they’ve got a job. Since I gave up the global big bucks for a life of artisanal tinkering tethered here in CharmingVille I’ve watched my nest egg dwindle to a few sorry twigs. Sure this place is cheap and interesting but I’m always hankering for the great Out There. My landing gear is perpetually up. This time last year I was swanning round the balmy Tuilleries clutching a frosty jeroboam, bumbag jangling with euros for the Metro troubadours. Later, while CharmingVille stewed in its own juices and the Hubster persevered through another Pchum Ben alone, I took off on the Annual Spitzburgen Sturgeon Muster with a bawdy phalanx of 20-something deckhands and a crate of tax-free Dubrowka. How we laughed and laughed as the waves tossed us up and down the bitter Barents, jostling us together in a funk of wet knits and nipple-high rubber waders. It was a thrilling escape – like all the other holidays I indulged in while the bank balance was groaning with benjamins. I globetrotted like the end of the world was nigh.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. The most I get to do these days, as you’ll know from last week’s report, is a six dollar turn round some godforsaken mid-river heat sink, or failing that, a night in at Marital HQ watching Gordon reruns and playing rolled-up paper soccer with the New Pet.

Straining at the yoke of this penniless tether-end, it was an insensitive note from Tripadvisor asking me to review the Eyjafjallajökull glacier that had me snatch up my limping credit card and “borrow” 40 crisp new orange hundreds from our household shrine (soz, mischevious ghost children), thence to de la Gare to self-prescribe some kick- arse HRT and a cheeky side of SSRIs. Just as I stepped into traffic a rainstorm intervened. As I sheltered under a downstairs awning I was joined by an excellent neighbour who shares my ache to swashbuckle and my detestation of shoestrings. With us was a coconut man. As I supped my 50cent drink my friend described us as “privileged poor” – educated, anglo middleclass midlifers with computers and aircon and a weekly brunch somewhere noice but without the readies to pony up for a pool condo, health insurance, a Lexus or a 3 week vaycay to Macchu Picchu. We don’t have regular jobs anymore, but get by with bits and bobs here and there. We go to the gym and swim and head for the coast on the weekends. We eat mangoes and coconuts and wear fuckall, all year round. We have a perfectly, enviably good life and should be thankful therefore. “For fuckssake stop whining”, he said. He was right. Even without a Gofundme, (which I might still try) for the cost of an airfare and a good pair of shoes you can work for room and board as a Fog Collector in Chile, or a Husky Wrangler in Finland. He’d just come back from a month with a Seaglass Beachcoming Collective in the Faroes. Farout, I thought. All is not lost. I looked across and saw a bald, bedraggled chinese dude, far from home, dressed up as Tripitaka and hustling tourists for a buck in the drizzle. Maybe I should save those red riels and buy me a ticket to write T-shirt Slogans in Guangzhou, bang squids on a rock in Skandili, or herd woolly lambkins on the rugged, bracing slopes of windswept Ok.

If you’re ever 12 hours deep into a rice wine slizzerfest on the banks of a rain-swollen Mekong with a rowdy clowder of shitfaced mates, and a cobra swims past minding its own business, and y’all decide it’s a good idea to catch the bugger so you can sell it later at the market to buy even more rice wine and some of those hot pickled clam things, here are some tips you might consider.

I can’t give you any sage advice on how to catch the cobra while hammered and up to your armpits in one of the world’s landmark waterways. Really, buddy, no one can. But once you’ve taken off your pants and tied up the legs and put the snake in and then tied up the waist so it can’t escape, it’s probably going to be livid. For sure it will have its teeth pointed directly at you, dripping with neurotoxins. Best not to taunt it then, no matter how hilarious smacking funny old Mr Hissy Pants with your Angry Bird flip flop is. And when you and the lads cosy up to the ‘I love you, mate’ stage of the evening, resist the urge to give the snake a cuddle too. Sure, it’s been through a lot tonight. We all have. If needs must, give it a cheers from a safe distance. But honestly it’s not your best friend forever. It won’t take care of your wife and kids should anything happen to you. Like getting bitten to death by a fucking cobra.

Unlike the infamous figment about a local lion maiming 42 midgets in a ring fight, this trouser snake story did actually happen – and right here in CharmingVille. I’m reminded of it since we had that monsoonal shit soup barrelling through our streets the other week. Snakes ache for a robust, rat-thick body of water. Unless your house is ankle deep in racist limes or you’ve got a bunch of mongooses, you’re up shit creek in the viper department.

Or not, apparently, if you’re a single gal or guy looking for love. According to my personal oracle of Cambodianness, aka The Hubster, snakes in a dream mean someone likes you. Snakes chasing after you means they really, really want to have sex with you. Snakes in real life means you’re already doing it like a boss. In the last three weeks my friend has had three snakes invade her actual kitchen. She’s a good sweet girl, but her parents have grounded her just in case.

I personally haven’t seen any snakes in my dreams for a while, or real life for that matter, unless you count the lame puffy one the Sofitel Brunch Clown made me last Sunday. It was a consolation prize following the untimely demise of Pootle, the balloon dog he’d fashioned for me earlier. I loved that crazy Koonsian pooch. But, like those lavishly inebriated sods with the cobra, it’s amazing what a heroically boozy afternoon by the river can make a person do. While my Life Partner distracted the carvery chef, I Instagrammed little Pootle next to the suckling pig like they were old mates from back on the farm days. But as I leant in to give Piglet’s little tail an extra twirl for the money shot it all went downhill, though mercifully quickly. In my rush to art direct the delightful tableau, I knocked poor Pootle too close to the heat lamp. Like a hot pink canine Icarus he exploded all over the gravy station with a loud bang that caused half a dozen tooth-sucking bodyguards to draw their service revolvers and push their designated generals face down in their foie. Every cloud has a silver lining, I guess.

But back to those other legless reptiles. I don’t have too many issues with serpents per se as long as they don’t eat my rabbit. If I walk into Marital HQ one day and there’s a fucking smug python flat out on the couch with a dislocated jaw and a huge lump halfway down, I’m not joking: there’ll be hell to pay.

Dear mid-life wanderer,

Please cast your mind back to 1974. It was a watershed year for spangly swingin’ Swedes Abba and a ruinous two fingers up for that jowly trickster Nixon. Mustard was the new avocado, since black hadn’t been invented yet. If you weren’t born, and/or you’re middle-class Anglo, you didn’t miss much. On the whole, 1974 will forever languish at the bottom of the beige shoulder-bag we call ‘the mid-‘70s’.

It would have been a complete waste of wall calendar, except that it was also the year my art-school-addled olds embarked on a harebrained circumnavigation of the world, much of it in an orange VW pop-top campervan, God-help-us. Their witless plan included my sibling and me – two bickering blonde poppets who seized every opportunity to derail Ma and Pa’s ambitious Grand Tour and reroute it through the seventh circle of Hell. Think Locked Up Abroad, with the Menendez Sisters.

For designated driver Dad, it must have been a teeth-grinding slog through a million are-we-there-yets, shameless Macca-for-museums bribery scandals and baguettes-at-dawn sibling bashery. Mum wore a lot of berets and recorded our jolly outing in a diary she still quotes from when the annual family slide-night palls. “On this day in 1974, ‘the girls promised the officers they would never do it again,’” or “The trauma nurses were very nice,” etc, etc. Dad was forced to shave his beard-nest at Moscow airport. My sister nearly drowned in Sweden. It cost half a pence to spend a penny in ye olde London towne.

Despite so few universally acknowledged plus points, 1974 gifted me with a LAG-bag of account-draining obsessions that I carry onboard to this day – and not just for the Instagram pics. Almost honestly, I can’t think of anything better to do than travel and eat at the same time.

So it thrills me to my flight socks when this time of year cruises into town. Oh, good old Khmer New Year, eh? Followed by good old May Day Holiday, majestic King’s Birthday, terrific Royal Ploughing weekend or sacred ancient lying-in-a-hammock-somewhere-idyllic fortnight. If you’re canny you can sort a month’s break and no one will notice, since CharmingVille is rolling with tumbleweeds and the only people around are cat burglars and sun-stunned tourists who forgot to check their Thorn Tree.

And it doesn’t really matter where the road takes me, unless it’s the ‘road’ to Rattanakiri. Just the going is as good as getting there, and going by plane has that extra frisson. I relish the weeks preparing for take-off, especially the Sunday afternoons decanting big liquids into small plastics – tiny bottles of conditioner are catnip to me. At the drop of a Zantac I’m off to De la Gare with a shopping list as long as a Koh Rong weekend: I won’t passenge without a Ziploc of Stilnox and earplugs nestled next to my moist towelettes. On the big day, I pause to bag-sit – Russian-style – and recite ‘passport, tickets, money, passport, tickets, money’ in a soothing mental rosary. I routinely arrive at Pochetong three, four, five hours early, which means I can spend a good hour or so using Burger King’s free wifi to gloat on Facebook. Did you know you can pretend you’re posting from the actual control tower? And my phone is sick with travel apps. Fuck Candy Crush. Give me the Air Asia flight schedule every time.

Once I’ve tsked the pushy tour guides line-jumping with a fist-load of Chinese passports at check-in, it’s off upstairs to sigh loudly while booze-reeking, inappropriately dressed bogans argue not to have their nunchucks confiscated. On board, after I’ve wet-tissued the nose grease off the window, viciously bagsed the armrest, and silently blessed the vital four millimetres of fabric between my skin and that of my fragrant neighbour, I settle in for the ride. If I’m not comatose on prescription sleep aids, I look to airline food – that culinary pariah – to provide guilty distraction in the flatulent hours aloft. Is that a black olive or a grape? Will they know if I take the baby salt and pepper shakers? Dinner roll: sweet or not?

Happily for me, the Hubster enjoys tramping, glamping, touring and trekking as much as I do. Well maybe not the trekking part – he’s happy to stay in the hut and mind the duty-free with those nice Norwegian backpackers while I take countless artsy photos in the ‘Charming Mountaintop Village’ genre: still-life pot on rustic brazier, old bloke on donkey groaning with shallots, ruddy cheeked tot. But still.

Unusually – and just in case you cat burglars can read – this holiday season he’s staycationing at our connubial HQ to Bunster-sit and play festive but unfathomable crack-your-neighbour’s-knee-with-stones games while drinking his weight in ABC. Meanwhile I’ve rolled up my elasticated eating pants, stuffed my wheelie with woollens and stocked up on hypnotics for a week with sis and the folks. 1974, you crazy tripper, here I come.

One day this week, as I was cleaning my teeth, I discovered I could make my boobs go up and down, independently of each other and at the same time, using nothing but the sheer herculean strength of my gym-nascent pectoral muscles. This is no mean feat. Each stupendous globe weighs as much as a cat. I know because I got out the kitchen scales. Then I put Pharrell on and we had a dance. I even Vibered the Hubster at work to let him know the good news. He sent me a nice emoticon flower. But like Tinder, kale smoothies and motos in the rain, even getting happy with your chesticles becomes old hat fast. In case I had something more diverting and life affirming up my sleeve, I skimmed through My List Of Things To Do Today:

1. Pay big blue water bottle dude.
2. Buy new pasta strainer.
3. Buy paint. Paint over grubby fingermarks from air-con repair guy.
4. Buy bleach + toothbrush/scrub grout.
5. Toenails?

I looked at my toenails with a question mark. I’d made my List in bed the night before, just after two stiff bloody marys and a cheeky Xanax left over from New Year’s. What was the roadmap for my wayward talons? Paint? Cut? Instagram? Was it a trick question? Stumped, I filed them away in the enervated mañana basket of my mind. Back at the List, I was dismayed to find four out of the five Things To Do needed pants on. Mission critical to three of them was actually stepping outside. I opened the window and put my hand in the outdoors. Barely 10 o’clock in CharmingVille and hot as the hinges of Hell. I had to find something at least mildly interesting and moderately useful to do that included icy cold air-con. For once I decided it couldn’t be playing Facebook, taking online personality tests or wrecking a third blender trying to make hummus off the internet.

Soon after I was colour coding my shoes and listening to a free sample of Rob Lowe’s new audio book to kill time before Law and Order. I plucked my eyebrows. I looked in the fridge 500 times. Ours beeps if you leave the door open too long. I spent a while seeing how far I could close it before it stopped beeping. Turns out it only stops when fully closed. Good to know. The Bunster was panting a bit having spent half an hour on the balcony eating his own poo. He seemed to be enjoying it. But I gave him an ill-conceived sponge bath anyway, which ended in me asking Dr Google if you can catch rabies from rabbits, via a long detour through some disturbing cat gifs.

It was in the middle of this flurry of activity that the power went out.

This was not the bad part. We’ve all been around long enough to hear the collective groans of an overheated, entertainment-free neighbourhood reverberate down each searing street. And the cheers as, a sweaty hour later, everything turns back on.

The bad part began when, during the quiet left behind after electricity is gone, I noticed a hairline crack appearing in the thin veneer of busywork, existential clock-watching and emotional jazz hands I’ve plastered over everything. Ennui and Malaise, those continental nemeses, for the first time accompanied by doleful, snivelling Loneliness, crept through my ever-widening gap. Merde. This hole thing threatened to turn a vaguely promising afternoon quickly and dramatically downhill. I admit I momentarily succumbed and threw myself onto the hard cold tile, blubbing and raging into my neatly rainbowed orthotics. Everybody else is having such a great time. I see their picture on Facebook yukking it up with plenty of sexy offline Brazilian friends on a sunset boat. Or eating smart canapés at yet another important basket-weaving exhibition. Normal people go out to dinner in big laughy groups, stay out after 9, run around the park and discuss the cultural zeitgeist over wheatgrass after yoga.

But as those three killjoys loitered in the corner laughing and pointing as my middle-class, first-world, paper-thin walls came tumbling down, my phone vibrated off the bedside table. It was one of the two-and-a-half people who’d actually leave their house for me, inviting me out for a dinner and a movie, followed by a nightcap and gossip chez them. Those whiny interlopers vanished. I found some pants and vowed that with friends like these, I need more. The thing is to get out amongst it. Even if it’s hot and I’m not Brazilian. I turned to grab my keys and Bunster was back on the balcony, despite the heat, eating his own poo, and smiling right at me. I smiled back. It was, coincidentally, the very moment that the lights went on.

This column was first published in Advisor Issue 124.

Rottweilers don’t give two fucks about fashion, which is lucky because at the pet shop on 163 they sell about 20 different styles of dog shoes and it’s all underarm-teacup-type sizes. It’s so hard to find stuff for the fuller figure in CharmingVille. But suck it up, Kaiser. That’s the Bodes all over when you’re a creature of size. Along with nanoscopic footwear for doglets you can get a weeny outfit and a matching clutch to put little Shitster in when you tire of him peeing down your kaftan at the next Meta House thing.

Apart from the canine clothes and accessories there’s little else for the rest of god’s creatures. Not a cat hat, lizard legging or beak warmer to be had for love or money. Snake belts are like hens’ teeth. I swung by there last weekend to purchase a tasteful merkin for my obscenely testicled rescue rabbit. He’s about 19 in human years with balls about the size of a 19-year-old human. Seriously. Those massive danglers are so completely out of proportion to the rest of his sorry physique that when they dropped I thought they were tumours and panic-Googled for an hour. Apparently it’s quite normal. But still. And he’s only got three working legs so his knackers just flap around in the atmosphere where a fourth leg would normally hide ‘em. I don’t judge him but it’s embarrassing when guests come over and Bunny’s just lying around, nuts out. They’re mesmerising and not in an attractive way. Plus he’s no oil painting – kind of a splotchy orange with hairless veiny ears and a mouth like a cat’s arse. So not the most attractive lagomorph on the block, then. It’s why we decided against a Facebook page.

He sniffs at any sun-warmed local market greens but devours crisper-fresh Bayon herbs. Coriander and dill are favourites. God help us if they’re out of season in Latvia or wherever they come from. On the weekend the crinkle of homecoming shopping bags has him skittering to meet us, trying his best at those vertical joy jumps that rabbit-nerds call ‘binkies’. On three legs he’s not Nadia Comaneci. He only drinks Evian.

Despite the massive gobbets, the ginger-no-mates pelt and the champagne tastes, he’s quieter than kids and watches American Idol tucked up in my armpit, nibbling imported gluten-free muesli and Arnott’s water crackers. He grooms our furniture, which saves me half an hour dusting. He likes to host the occasional rice knees-up on the balcony for his chittering sparrow mates. He’s a literal party animal.

Most entertainingly he grimly and regularly fucks anything that doesn’t move. This could be a chair leg or an actual leg. Rabbits do have sex faces. They are eerily familiar. On frenzied completion he’ll swoon dramatically and wake up seconds later as if nothing had happened. Pff. No surprise since 94% of our genes rabbits also have.

And if the arsehole neighbour comes to our door muttering and unlocking his service revolver, Bunster bravely thumps the bejesus out of his solitary hindquarter to let us know shit’s going down. I don’t know how he knows it’s him and not the man with the water bill. Bunny is an actual pet detective with x-ray vision and supernatural powers. He may be a libidinous, unattractive three-legged Paul the Octopus, but I wuvs him.

Committing to a companion animal other than your other half is as strangely liberating and transformative as it is comforting. I stopped worrying about life being so much better somewhere I wasn’t. A little furry mate turns a transient stop in an alien land into a feel-good place to call forever home. I’m heartwarmed to see more and more foreign pet lovers here in CharmingVille. And not just the good folk who liberate bestringed kittens dancing for the tourist dollar at Wat Ounalom, or rescue wormy street puppies from a terminal game of chicken with the oncoming traffic (bless you everyone, by the way).

When I’m wondering what the fuck I’m doing here, I see some hot new bloke taking his beagle to the shops in a tuk tuk, or a French chick gamely dragging up and down Riverside on the end of a standard poodle. I’m not alone in my choice of one-horse hometown. CharmingVille is the cat’s pyjamas after all.

This column was first published in Advisor Issue 111.

During a lull in upstairs’ installation of what I assume, by the relentless fucking racket, is Cambodia’s first Large Hadron Collider, I took the opportunity to balance the monthly accounts. It’s a mildly criminal task that requires laser focus anad a tomb of silence because I don’t know how to play Excel, plus I have the attention span of me watching Khmer TV.

Ledger cracked, pencil licked and receipts stacked in a ramshackle Jenga weighed down with a bracing crock of Panda plonk, the books simmered along nicely for about 10 minutes until my computer pinged. Shit. Like Pavlov’s bitch I strained towards its siren tug. Was it some tweaky Sinville codge ranting over the price of the visa-run bus to Nana Plaza? Maybe Gwyneth sharing a colon poultice recipe and news of her Kickstarter to upcycle Taittinger corks into yoga mats for street people? Perhaps someone had posted a… Oh, nevermind. I lifted the lid and damn that Pandora – she’d sent me 600,000 pixels of adorable fluffy bubby wittle wabbit holding a wittle cawot.

I’m a shallow sentimentalist at the best of times, and this was one of them. Like an emotionally superficial deer transfixed in the potent wash of hormonal headlights, I was compelled to witter and coo, out loud, as though that fuzzy, virtual poppet would, at any moment, shamble wuffling into my arms and suckle each weepy heartstring dry. Like Homer in drooling thrall to a dozen Krispy Kremes, resistance was impossible. Even with a real life furball of pet-crack at my feet – to wit: The Bunster carb-loading the brand new Bambillo mum gave me for KNY – I still couldn’t drag my zombiefied peepers off that kawaiiest little tyke.

You can never touch too many animals. I proved this on my recent trip Down Under, where quokkas, bilbies and poteroos – our ratty ersatz lagomorphs – were routinely fondled on my way to the outhouse, and where you could, say, force the whole family to go on a picnic at the park and then pat anyone’s dog and then eat a sandwich straight after if you absolutely had to without washing your hands and not get sick. My friend has a cockatiel called Ian.

CharmingVille is sadly not Bunning’s on a Saturday morning where the local Girl Guides host a Petting Zoo with piglets and everything. If the urge to mingle with our friends on all fours goes beyond trawling the PPAWS Facebook Page for miraculous success stories (saints, I tell you, saints!), I make up an excuse to drive to Suriya via 63 so I can glimpse the encaged furries at the roadside pet penitentiaries. It’s not ideal. Seeing those poor little panters cooped up in the heat makes me feel worse. As much as I’d love to bundle them all up – doves, cats, dogs, bunnies and toitles, oh my – I know that stepping away from the tuk tuk will likely end in tears, and more of those little fellows cranked out to replace them.

If you’re animal crackers my mother-in-law lives across the river in a bucolic stilt house ankle deep in peeping chicklets. They’re not much fun overall, but will do in a pinch and you can corral them into a basket for a gentle rummage. She also has a nice creamy Cambodian cow I can go look at – they’re so pretty from far away but get closer and they’re just cow-shaped wasp magnets with flies orbiting in biblical swarms. Nothing says I’m comedy gold like a big fat white human flailing at invisible insects ‘round the backyard where the whole commune is sat down for a blessing lunch. Absolute pants cacking, Heimlich-manoeuvering fucking hilarious. I can’t tell you. And even if the insects are elsewhere, the family bovine supervises a posse of murderous canines, including a half-blind moppet so vicious he possibly poked his own eye out just to show everyone how tough he is. Santa’s Little Helper he ain’t.

So in general I’m less inclined to run my hands through the local wildlife. I’m not being racialist. It’s just they hate my guts. The mean-streets cats in my building sidle past, all eyes and colossal testicles, lashing out at the mere thought of me disrupting their ear-mite colonies with a wittle tickle. There’s a yappy, no good shitzudoodle that sits at the head of my stairs, bedraggled and underbit, sporting an apple-green satin cape and a laser death stare dripping with seething resentment. Its natty owner, Ron the bookie, also finely attired in a knife-pressed shirt with fags in the pocket and the moist pallor of heart trouble in his stars, always giggles and offers up the little bugger for me to pat. I think you’re a top bloke Ron, but sorry mate, I’m not poking my wee fandanglers into that vicious little sneerbag now or ever.

I saw by your woolly urban perambulations, your snow-pink, over-wing clouds, and those inky pickled walnuts nestled artfully twixt a dimpled mug of artisanal stout and a good sharp cheese that many of you checked-in far from the ankle deep tar-suck of CharmingVille’s molten streets. You socialed from iced latitudes that required a nice big fleecy muff. I don’t blame you. I don’t usually take the weather personally but that Global Warming bitch has clearly decided multi-tasking is overrated and plumped for roasting just we Penhcentric fools for the forseeable. I didn’t fancy twisting in hell, counting blazing  tumbleweeds. Even those no-mates “it’s-actually-great-to-be-here-without-all-the-traffic” fabulists who normally stay put fled to the cooling beer cannon of Temple Town or down to Novy Crimea to swagger, mankinied, with their deadeyed cohort of tweaker goons.

So this annual turnover I rolled up the mittens and sundry other furry coddlers, inflated the wading pool for a panting, newly neutered Bunster, and me and Love’s Helpmeet crossed our fingers on an MH flight all the way to Oz.

Autumn downunder fartarses between steamy ay.em. sweats to the dog park and freezing your tits off predawn in a godforsaken tent woven entirely of icicles. We stay with the folks in their cosy, artsy pad in the bed where my declining granddad finally fell asleep with Jesus. I used to find lying in a dead relative’s penultimate resting place disconcerting until, after some verbal biffo with the pre-Hubster back in the early years, I slept a few nights in a 172 backpackery on a mattress which was in fact the penthouse suite of a roach condo. I was the rooftop spa and gymnasium. All night legions of oily, stinking scuttlers roamed my generous real estate. I can’t tell you anything more without retching. After that character-building seven hours of intrusive entomology, kipping in dead poppa’s snooze box is a mere bagatelle.

It was a nice change to wake up to the liquid warble of magpies and the thud of the newspaper landing on the front porch instead of the sound of angle grinders and straining aircons. Over cups of tea and crumpets dripping with Leatherwood honey me and dad did the daily quiz off the funnies pages. I’ve been away so long I had no idea what LBL is, or that cars no longer have registration stickers. Meanwhile, Mum and Hubster would hilariously miscommunicate wheeling in the overnight bins and gasbagging with the postie.

I love mum and dad. They are funny and generous. Mother drops golden fifties like breadcrumbs – the trail that leads to coffee, zoo tickets, snacks. “Surely you’ll need a hot dog at IKEA.” She’s deaf, literally and figuratively, and won’t take no for an answer even when she’s “got her ears on.” Worried that they’ll run out and end up sharing Whiskas on toast, we put most of it back when she’s not looking – her purse is like a fairytale goose that just keeps egging us on.

Despite this cash splashing they hail from an era of wood rations and hand-me-down underpants made from the stuffing of next door’s hard-rubbished horsehair sofa. Having not caught up to TV, underfloor heating and flannelette jim jams, Tasmania in the ‘60s was exactly the same as London during the blitz, apparently. It was a cold old hole with few creature comforts and the warbaby olds still live back there in spirit, if not in body, up to their nostalgias in bread and dripping sandwiches. Now domiciled in the Mediterranean climes of Australia’s boganest capital, but still as environmentally conscious as they were back when they lay down in front of the dozers to Save The Lake, they’re loathe to switch on a heater or chuck another mallee root in the stove. Each chill eve they settle in for Antiques Roadshow under piles of crochet lap rugs bequeathed by Great Auntie Pat, the last of the Huon Valley’s notorious lady beekeepers. Unlike me, who packed a lightweight winter sarong and relished fall’s cool breath on my chicken-skinned shoulders, they get about with socks on their hands and legwarmers handspun from upcycled corn husks the minute the temperature dips below 18. Being a tropical person, Husband was appalled by the mercury’s vertiginous plummet. Throwing caution and street cred to the stiffening wind, he wore the duvet off our bed like a fat Michelin poncho for the entire 10 days we were there, even when he went New Year’s partying with some newfound Cambo mates at the Paradise Lakes Treatment Plant Scout Hall, requisitioned for the purpose by Adelaide’s sizeable Khmer contingent. They played nut kicking, ate a lot of eel, and hand danced to an authentically tone deaf cha-cha band. Just like home, though no ice in the beer. No matter what time of year, it’s always cold enough. Suorsdey Chnam Thmey.

She: Oh thank god. I finally found the only other lesbian in Cambodia besides me.

Me: I’m not a lesbian.

She: Well, you fucken’ look like one.

Me: …

She: And don’t think I’m trying to chat you up or anything!

Right you are, sister. And while you’re out, single and staggering – stillies in hand – down life’s walk of shame, I’m the one snug as a bug in the arms of my doting, top-hot rootrat better half. So go fuck yourself. Said no one ever – and especially not me.

Instead, later on that evening, I found myself hunched over my handbag in a tuk tuk, parked inexplicably in the Caltex Bokor forecourt, mewling pitifully into a moist towelette and scaring the poor driver into smoking 300 cigarettes well out of sobshot.

For long after my happy hand-dancing half hour (Dusk till Dawn), well past the apocalyptic shot-quaffing phase (Nova), and languishing deep in the repetitive but inevitable post 3am shambaholic mawk (on the footpath outside Pontoon), I had foolishly remembered this encounter. My enfeebled self esteem, perpetually sickly since the time my sister got a pony and I didn’t, had now collapsed in a moribund heap and was shallow-breathing its terminal gasps. It wasn’t the sapphic taunt that bothered me. I’m as heteroflexible as the next person. I accept that with my half-arsed home cut mullhawk and penchant for tasteful sneakers I could just pass for Ellen in the right light. It wasn’t even that my crapulous rejectress wine-burped in my face a little bit as she said it. It was that she wasn’t even trying to hit on me. Nothing says you’re a hideous, unbonkworthy crone, straight and/or LGBT, like a blousy, shit-faced, middle-aged dyke who wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.

Or does it? My current hot, youthful husband accepts my ample silhouette, my kumbayah-meets-Harry-Styles wardrobe and my self-inflicted Howard Jonesian hair with admirable forbearance. And classic, candid Khmerness. ‘You were fat when I met you. Still fat now. Love you all the time.’ Bless. He’s never drawn into the old: ‘Is my arse bigger than Nikki Minaj’s?’ or ‘Do you think I should go to Bangkok to get my fat sucked out from my <insert body part here>?’ He may not know who Nikki Minaj is, but he’s not fucking stupid. I’m heartened by his forthright vote of confidence. But Cambodian straight talk works both ways.

I was rummaging deep inside Psar Chas the other week when a tiny, wisened prune with betel-inked lips and two random teethpegs grabbed my admittedly stupendous tits harder than strictly necessary and cackled: ‘Thom! Thom!’ The fortune teller next to us nearly pissed her pants. Hilaire. I felt like a couple of mangoes at Lucky or a Nat Geo special on a lost Papuan tribe.

I laughed anyway, as one must. It’s The Way of The Bodes. Everyone I know gets the: ‘Are you pregnant?/Wow so hairy/ Very, very fat!’ and sometimes all in the same sentence. Khmers aren’t spared, either. A young monk in my colleague’s history lecture told her she looked like a monkey. He wasn’t being mean. She really does.

As the StarMart fluoros illuminated my tears and the tiny fairy of my fading self-worth squeezed my hand and fell back into a swoon, I started coming round. Like, it took me a few goes, but I have a small, loving group of sexy, funny and smart friends who make me feel sexy, funny and smart. I have a husband. Ditto. I considered that my loudmouth nemesis probably left the house sober and hoping for fun, flirtation and an Earth-moving bang. Don’t we all? If she’d been a bit more of a gentleman we could have had a laugh and a quick cottage out the back. But manners, dear. I don’t give a shit how many chardonnays you’ve had. Unminced words or not, everyone in our Charming Ville is just trying to get along, discover a new friend and maybe even snag a mate. It’s never easy. So darlings, please play nice.

This column originally appeared in Advisor Issue 104. Mrs. Smith is currently disappointing lesbians abroad.

This Khmer New Year you won’t see me ‘round the traps reenacting Beyonce’s Halo through my own unique brand of interpretive dance. I’m as disappointed as you are, but needs must, and this festive break I’m boarding the jazz clogs with my personal cobbler while me and Hubster head off to Dementia Village to visit my very good friends, The Parents.

It’s not the Dementia Village per se. That’s an actual one near Amsterdam where maybe one day a bunch of Dutch architects was probably chillaxing ‘round the communal meerschaum with half a pound of sweet Blueberry Kush and, cranial light bulbs ablaze, thought, “Well Hellootjes! Wouldn’t it be swell to build a hamlet that looks and works like the olden days where residents are pathologically forgetful old timers who think it’s still 1967, and live-in healthcare professionals dress up as the postman or the tobacconist?” Kind of like the Truman Show but with rainbow bicycles and a shitload of floor-to-ceiling honey pine cabinetry. Nothing smells like wee and the oldies spend their twilight years feeling right at home comparing snert recipes and enjoying the odd hip-cracking key party at shuffleboard nights down at the local windmill like everyone else does in Holland apparently. There are no frantic calls to the cops if grootvader wanders off, since he’s free to totter around forgetfully and safely under the watchful eyes of covert carers while they whip up his poffertjes or deliver milk bottles to his doorstep with a cheery wave. Bingo, alles kits achter de rits. Except for the name. You’d have thought those toasty bouwmeesters might have leveraged the gift of visionary genesis a bushel of stonking Alaskan Thunderfuck bestows and fangled something at least a little euphemistic. But it’s a small niggle. Some of my best acquaintances are Dutch, and I applaud them – for this and for having the hottest airport security staff in the world. And also for brilliantly, though again possibly under the influence of a cheeky kilo of Illawarra Stank, inventing adult hide-and-seek in IKEA stores. When I’m back home we also play hide and seek in IKEA, but only because Mum gets confused with the shortcuts and Dad gets bored around about the mattress section, tucks up under a Hönsbärand and drops off listening to the news.

I know I’m a whiny middle class blouse, but I can’t help feeling resentful that perhaps I’m becoming my mother. It would be fine if she were a 23-year-old Brazilian beach volleyball player named Heidi. You don’t see those chicas dropping plastic in the sensible pants department or comparing orthotics at U Care. They’d not fret about whether the iron was still on after they’d gone to Panda to get some sausages and have to run back up two flights to check and then forget why they were standing in the kitchen wheezing like a 200 fag a day fucking walrus and looking just about as attractive. They probably don’t even have an iron since they only ever wear lycra kinis and god knows mum hasn’t been within Zimmer distance of a bikini since 1955.

As the years stagger past I do worry about what’ll happen when the lights are on but no one’s home. I’ll probably never have to sell fluorescent palm frond animals on a stick for 50 cents each at the Monivong KK intersection when I’m 70. Or push a cart full of stinking shellfish through the baking April streets when I should be feet up on the Barcalounger® watching Downton with a nice iced cuppa cha. In life’s big lucky draw I’ll probably never be that tiny, right-angled ancient in the spotless white blouse and neat sarong begging for pennies out front of the Museum.

Thank god I married a man half my age. If, in another 15 years or so when my brainbox shrinks to the size of a walnut, and fingers crossed he’s still compos after all those afternoons down the petanque club with Johnny Walker and his klatsch of CharmingVille armchair oracles, I’m looking to him to squire me out for bubble tea or wheel me and my oxygen tent out for a groundhog afternoon of G&Ts by the pool. It’s not Dementia Village, but as assisted living facilities go, there’s no place like CharmingVille.