Byline: Ruby Smith

Even though he’s a urinalysis observer by trade and rarely leaves the crepuscular bowels of the supermax correctional facility where he works, my friend Agamemnon is a natural born interior design savant. It’s why this Monday I was dragging old Agster ‘round Marital HQ on a Skypetour. I wanted his gimlet peepers scoping the recent renos me and The Hubster slaved over in lieu of having human children. After months of schvitzing up and down the ‘Tung looking for non-slip tiles that don’t feature a gold ‘n’ pebble Hang Ten motif, paintbrushes that won’t shed like a box of cats, and mirrors free from any kind of frosted swan, sailboat and/or dolphin combo, our revamped Love Pod was ready for wi-fives from my wine-dark Interior Tastemaker. Followed by an orgy of self-aggrandising Instagram uploads from Yours Truly.

So through the magic of technology here I was in CharmingVille flouncing around in a pomegranate kaftan, brandishing a laptop and half a jug of Tijuana Hookers while, 8,000 miles away, my personal ornamentalist sat in a dank bunker behind a 3-centimetre plexiglass screen simultaneously watching convicted felons wee into paper cups and inspecting the first objet in our domestic odyssey: the enormous driftwood mobile strung up in our porte cochere. I was a bit nervous. My gruff Greek DIY oracle shuns shabby chic, urban industrial, and mid-century modern. He spits on artfully arranged vignettes like, say, the vintage drinks trolley under the mounted antlers, the cluster of seven variously framed nudes on the teal feature wall, and the rusty je ne sais quoi reclaimed from a. an abandoned mental asylum, b. a disused fair ground or c. Chernobyl mounted next to the fiddle-leaf fig planted in the upcycled Victorian birthing chair. And don’t get him started on terrariums. Damn those succulents. He sees one more midget fucking garden in a mason jar he’ll take it and smash its living daylights out like an Aegean wedding guest gone mad. He has an exacting penchant for Nordic trapper luxe, as do I, and though a nipple-deep Fuglestad bathroom mat may not be climate-appropriate BodeSide, I knew from his enraptured gaze I’d scored the first of many mammoth stamps. Apparently it was “EV.ER.Y.THING!” Ditto the feature chair hewn from a single piece of Eyjafjallajökull pumice, and the scrimshaw headboard depicting the Oratory at Gröf I’d schlepped all the way back from last year’s Spitzburgen Sturgeon Muster. Ags was all aboard my Scandi bus and high on the birch stink until, flustered by technology and my third goblet of tequila and pickle juice hipster fail, I accidentally panned the webcam too far past the prahok jar trivet fashioned from a decommissioned bear trap. Behold our balcony undone. Our decrepit, sun struck terrace of shame has as much kerb appeal as Gold Tower 42. Before I could think of a distraction and only managed “Aeon has ceramic swans with air ferns in them!” my Hellenic muse, lip curled, pointed past the replica narwhal couchette and out through the willow-wood doors.  “I’m no fucking Sparta,” he hissed through his bristling chin thicket, “But what the hell is that?”

Okay, so sure it’s a glitter cactus from the plant bit in Central Market. I don’t know if you’ve seen them. They‘re cactuses with their spines painted with white glue then blue glitter sprinkled on them, and they’re $3.50. This spangled fancy is the last hope for what I like to think of as our urban re-wilding project, if Phnom Penh used to look like a Smurf disco in the Mojave Desert. It’s not a homeware I would ever choose for myself, but I thought its festive spines might gee up my fungal tomato plants and the Hubster’s wilting winter melon-choko-squash thing that neither of us has ever eaten before in our lives. They were the only seeds that hadn’t expired their use-by-date at the pesticide bodega in O’Russei. It gets depressing when you go out in the morning to spy on the guy on the opposite balcony practicing his karaoke face in a shaving mirror and find woolly white thrips, like Lilliputian Finnish flocks, sucking the lifejuice from our sorry vines.

Hubster is the son of a farm family, and I have generations of Roundup running through my veins, so we both hanker to live off the land. But like everyone’s aerial overhang in central Pnomps, there’s no actual soil in sight – it’s a monkey’s breakfast of mops, washing line, broken furniture, three surplus tiles, an inexplicable brick, someone’s old Pikachu tank top, and an assortment of pots and plants in various states of decay. In my head it’s a tasteful, sub-arctic Pinterest Board called “Garden of Wonder” but in real life it’s a paean to brown thumbs and green intentions gone to seed. The only redeeming feature is a sparrow horde that feasts on the weevilly rice I put out every day. I’ve tried tovikingise out there – my Georg Jensen tureen is now a capacious birdbath which becomes an avian geothermal spa even as the sun beats me and the Hubster back inside to our arctic A/C and reindeer throw. It’s then those little chitterlings come hopping and fluffing, dipping their panting beaks and showering our blighted outdoors in happy chirps. For them it’s like a Jacuzzi in Skútustaðahreppur.  Or a day at the beach in the Dodecanese.

Earlier today I made a cheeky 200 smackers flogging old jam jars in the heartless snakepit that is the Phnom Penh Buy, Sell, Haggle, and Troll Pathetic Uber-Thrifters With Uncalled-For But Hilarious Passive Aggressive Comments Group Facebook Page. As I pocketed the cash and donned my formal shopping sombrero against the sun, which I’m positive was tethered at the end of my street, I had every intention of trawling a couple of appliance emporia for a spanking new front loader. I’d even measured the hole in our kitchen island and organised a “plumber.”

But, like Jack out of Jack and the Beanstalk, send me out to buy a cow and I’ll come back with a beanbag and a hundredweight of mango pickle. This sweat-drenched arvo was no exception. I stood under the numpang guy’s Anchor umbrella, palms upturned, weighing my options like a heat-struck mime. Underpaid, slack-jawed shufflers sans clue at the flyblown washing machine place? Or me-time with whale music and an aesthetician called Fab? Before you can say “Take a little more off the top, thanks Lionel!” I was nestled in my new favourite wrinklearium in the heart of CharmingVille’s cosmeceuticals district waiting for a hypodermic and 14 units of “Wow, I thought you were only 27!” Well, hello Clostridium botulinum.

Back in the early noughties my face looked exactly like a baby’s arse, except for the whisper of a line tiptoeing across the bridge of my nose. I obsessed over this ever deepening groove – a product of squinting into a monitor on exotic locations while filming panty shield ads with gallons of blue liquid and girls running through slow motion raindrops laughing and laughing. It was a proper job that paid extortionately well and, since at that time I had no tots or helpmeets to pester the bank balance, it was entirely up to me how I frittered it all away. I chose travel, drugs and facial renovation. Imagine my delight when I found I could combine all three.

During my Southeast Asian salad days the SARS pandemic was in full plague. But I was a mercenary advertising spinner who could weave a silver lining from the blackest winding sheet. I’d nip across to deserted, desperate Singapore and hole up in an almost empty Grand Hyatt for tuppence ha’penny a night. It was lucky that airfares and hotels were so cheap, ‘cos Botox and filler cost a fucking arm and a leg back then. So I’d have a glass of bubbles around 8am, wander down to a shiny medical tower on Orchard and come out an hour later 800 bucks lighter, with bloody pinpricks on my forehead and lips the size of bagels.

Botox is less tiny painful pearls of acid and more straight liquid poison, so although Doctor Joyce was the Michelangela of mouth sculpture, I stopped doing the filler because actually they’re just pumping your lip tubes with nano beady things and it really, really hurts. It makes you sweat and squeal, and not in a good way. I had the option of anaesthetic cream but was too impatient to shop the going-out-of-business sales than to wait 40 minutes for it to work. There was also novocaine but how can you stuff your gob with gourmet laksa if you can’t feel anything from the neck up?

The last time I got my forehead chemically ironed was almost a year ago in Bangers. Frivolous trips to the gender reassignment capital of the world for 10 minutes at Miss Porn Orchid Face and Bodyworks are out of the question since I joined the impecunious ranks of CharmingVille’s midlife wanderers. I searched for a clinic right here in our glorious, naturally attractive hamlet that met simple criteria: cheap, A/C, all the lights on, clean needles and absolutely no fucking Kenny G.

The place I found not only fit this bill, but Prince had obviously had a hand in the décor. As I reclined on the electric purple crushed velvet chaise, the silver glitter wallpaper twinkled with actual Swarovski crystals and my “doctor” prepared my head skin with a lavender satin icepack. In the time it took him to get his cosmetology diploma I was punctured and pricked and relaxing in the Recovery Parlour listening to the soundtrack of Frozen. I’m not lying about that bit. It was eerie. Anyhow, there was iced water and ladies around me in various face swaddles playing Facebook. Except for the one droopy eye, I felt I was looking 10 years younger already.

I know I should have plumped for the Miele. But no one ever dies wishing they’d done more washing. When I fall off the perch and Joaquin Phoenix is kissing my cheek adieu at my open casket post clog-pop carouse he’ll marvel at my enduring youthful good looks, and I’ll be happy knowing that getting some work done was all worth it in the end.

BAt 2:27am this morning, Hubster instructed me not to tell you about the dream I just had. That’s because it was me and Hun Sen chit-chatting airside at that faux-French coffee stall while waiting to board our flights. My cautious Life Partner was nervous, not entirely without foundation, about what might befall me if I spilled the beans on my Prime Ministerial phantasm. The fact that it was a dream held no truck. “You still thought it,” he said. “Even though you were asleep.” I maundered on about free speech and thought police, illustrated at length with the plotlines of Brazil (the movie, not the place), 1984 (the book and the movie) and the Spanish Inquisition (the actual thing). I assumed Love’s help meet was glued to my every word, until a Homeresque snort from the quilty gloam signaled his wuffle back to Nod. In deference to my fretful spouse, then, I’ll skip the more controversial aspects of my fantasy confab with the big man.
It was pleasant enough at Gate 5 – a teen swarm of gormless Singaporean evangelicals in matching

T-shirts were prayer-circling all the tables at the café, so me and HS bellied up to the condiment stand. I don’t think I’m giving away state secrets when I say I was off to Bangers for some well-deserved me-time and a high colonic at my favorite Arse Spa ‘n’ Botox Barn. Despite my persistent winkling, Mr. Hun kept good naturedly schtum about where he was going and why, though he did have his personal luthier in tow. Looking back now, that should have been a clue. “I hate to be a fun sponge,” he said. “But if I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

Despite this coy circumspection, we nevertheless spent a jovial 10 minutes or so talking about that damn dress – he and I were on the same page – are people crazy or what? It’s SO cream and gold. And OMFG we both ordered a cheese toastie extra pickle at EXACTLY the same time. Snap! I hadn’t expected us to see eye to eye on anything, all things considered. I was thrilled to my flight socks. Spanner Alert: things were going well until a miscommunication with his security detail over my post-toastie brownie ended badly. I won’t get into the grits but it was enough to scare the living shitsticks out of me. I woke up in a cold sweat and spent the rest of the night quivering with the light on.

Sleep is a fickle mistress ‘round my crib. I’d certainly fail the Tuk Tuk Academy entrance exam, not just because I have a pretty good sense of direction and don’t know how to play chess, but because I have not one iota of aptitude for shuteye, especially when I’m parked in front of the angle grinding shop on Mao Tse Tung with my T-shirt rolled up to my boobs and my back-skin stuck to the vinyl on a 37-degree day. Those dudes are machines. Hats off.

Though we have a spectacularly comfortable mattress concoction newly gleaned from our favorite house of latex on Monivong, recently gassed air con, and a dark room at the quieter end of the house, nature’s soft nurse is elusive ‘round ours. Last nightmare’s sleeplessness is par for the course, as most of you CharmingVille Pleasurers will understand. We’re not in Kansas, or even Outback, snuggled in a swag, far from the sturm and drang of city clangs and clatter with just the whispered lullaby of emus rustling through the saltbush. Our sunkissed bods are not slung amongst the stars in a hammocky cocoon down the quiet end of Otres on a weeknight in low season. Our little tootling, tinkerpot, bow wow Hamlet is fraught with the sounds of life turned up to 11. Blissful torpor without the assistance of De La Gare’s stellar roster of sleep aids can be almost impossible to achieve, unless you’re high up in a condo in Tuol Kork. But nobody wants that.

So I hit the sack unencumbered with Z-drugs at your peril. Because if it’s not old mate next door pestling shallots at 4:23 every morning, including Sundays, it’s those tokays licking their eyeballs and invading your earholes with their lizardy bark. Next to good dreams gone bad, there’s the power going off after midnight on the hottest night of the year (i.e. every night from now ‘til November). With the electricity down, the woolly blanket of air con’s white noise slips off, the neighbourhood gennies crank up, and you emerge cotton-mouthed from Morphean slumber adrift in your own mini Mekong of sweat. Night night, dear reader, and sweet, wet summer dreams.

Last night there were only two things worth watching on TV. One was Channing Tatum and Bear Grylls stripping off their zippy trousers and lumberjackets atop a mossy precipice and jumping into a waterfall together, whooping like gibbons as they went. I loathe heights and, so engrossed was I in their manly jackanapes, I forgot this was just TV and waited breathless for a bloody bloom to appear in that roiling, rocky basin below. Just in time, those alpha boisterers shot out from the chill depths in super slow-mo with their ab packs glistening and shaking the drops off their hair like sexy TV seals. And laughing and laughing. Oh, how they laughed. After sundry muddy rollicks they made a little house in a batty cave, scouting for broody she-cats first. As they lounged shirtless and musky, consummate woodsman Bear showed greenhorn Tatum how to light a fire with a single human hair. Or fashion a saucepan out of his belt buckle then cook some grubs in it. Something like that. Anyway it was just delightful to see two red-blooded outdoorsy gents from oh-so-different entertainment genres bromancin’ over ant scroggin and scouring each other’s pelts for juicy ticks.

Over on the other channel it was the same odd-couple madcappery, but with adorable animal babies, untimely wrench’d from nature’s furry teat. Clint, a destitute rhino tot with abandonment issues, was paired with an experienced sheep called Harry. Harry was shit scared – and who wouldn’t be? Young Clint was one thousand pugnacious kilos of seething rhino resentment. But as the almost unintelligible Seth Efriken voiceover man said, this year’s star ungulate is genetically predisposed to flock up, and ain’t too fussy who with. Soon enough our woolly helpmeet was cleaved to Clint like lamby Velcro, fluffing and jinking round those thumping great clodhoppers and weaponised snout like Maddie Ziegler in a shaggy jacket. It was so heartwarming I soon realised I was squealing with delight at the TV. Later, we saw a widowed Orangutan and her colour-coordinated cat, a badger and foxlet couple and, most darling, the toddler baboon mothering a clingy, glassy-eyed bush baby all over the shop. My tearstrings were yanked right out of their sockets. Honestly, TV doesn’t get much better than that.

Like when Bear met Chan and Clint met Harry, CharmingVille’s chockers with all manner of incongruous togetherness – animal, vegetable, mineral and metaphysical – that cook my cockles all the way through. Like, who in their right mind pairs a green tartan Easter bonnet with tailored woollen jacket over black satin pants, artisanal spats, and make it work? Impish Mr. Fang, the cyclo gaffer at Psar Kandal, that’s who. He’s a fucking sartorial genius, like a nuttier Alexander McQueen pre-incarnate. And who doesn’t love sunflower pyjamas at the movies at four o’clock in the afternoon? A policeman with a Pleasant Goat helmet? Socks ‘n’ thongs?

Call me chkuit but word mashups tickle me fancy almost as much as old Bear ‘n’ Tates comparing third nipples. Today on my way to lunch I saw a blackboard outside an all nations eatery on Pop Street – I could have Crimboll Eggs with my choice of penkeks and/or bacon. I had to say Crimboll in my head and then out loud, in a decreasingly Khmenglish accent, before I got scrambled. I gave myself a mental back slap: what an inadvertently marvelous new word, and how clever of me to work it out. But wait. As I stepped out of my tuk tuk, I accidentally left my eyewear on the seat. My driver handed them back. “Take care your sunclash!” Of course that’s what they are.

Pulling up to the pumps just as your motoduhp lights up another Disco, you scope a centenarian codger and his srey saart strolling with his ‘n’ hers bubble teas. You may see two constabularians holding hands in the shade of the Wat Botum banyans.

There could be a street kitten snoring like a trumpet in the arms of a God on 178. And don’t look now, but there’s a man sitting cross-legged by a temple lion at Chbar Ampoev, singing to his blissfully comatose fighting cock. My favourite ensemble is usually parked outside the Ministry of Cults and Religions on Sisowath – a Golden Retriever sitting opposite the stout fortune teller in her tuk tuk having his cards read.

Oh, of course there are the other strange bedfellows in our pandemonious hamlet that’ll raise the ire of some and eyebrows of many. I may have a PHD in Hedonic Psychophysics, a three-legged rabbit and a husband, but I’ve still got no fucking clue about love. So who am I to judge?

If you’re a bit on the unattractive side, you can breathe a sigh of relief this week. I looked, and people even uglier than us have been shortlisted to go to Mars and never come back. In nobly seeking a future superburb for jam-packed earthlings, and apparently in the name of better-looking ones, these homely dread-nauts decided to strand themselves on a kind of metaphorical interplanetary mountain top to be eaten by space wolves.

To be honest I’m a bit disappointed my dream to be the other Mars rover is over. Having been hit more than once with a sizeable ugly stick, I clearly meet at least half the criteria. Sheer hubris fuelled by eyes too close together and a dowager hump the size of Brocchi’s Cluster made me think I could simply squeeze past the rigorous academic testing and thence the whooshy airlock doors by dint of my repellant physiognomy. I had my backpack stocked with jerky and pinot grigio and everything. It’s not that I particularly want to cark it in a tin pod on the godforsaken Martian tundra drinking recycled wee and talking to myself. Although, you’d think the converse re. the last two with all the practice I’ve had ‘round Marital HQ when Hubster’s “gone to a wedding in the province” and accidentally takes both sets of house keys.

It’s just that I don’t usually get picked for anything. The Ultimate Trip Of A Lifetime to our adjacent bone-cold orb would’ve made a nice change. I’d get to grow tomatoes in a moist jungly biosphere and wear a nice grey tank top and cargo pants like Sigourney Weaver. Who doesn’t want that? Plus, there’d be no YouTube so even if there weren’t any limpet experiments or ray machines to fix that day I wouldn’t waste hours watching vile 50 Shades of Grey trailers like I usually do when I’m bored shitless at work. I could catch up on my reading, or watch the icy twin moons limn our fulvous lost horizon. Or knit my ill-conceived alienates fancy balaclavas for when the sight of themselves gets too much.

I’m extra vexed because I didn’t make the cut on the reality show they’re shooting down at Koh Rong either. This time because I’m past the use by date for anything useful, reality show-wise. Can’t run fast enough, can’t bear children in case we need to perpetuate the species, can’t wear a bathing suit without mesh tummy control. Fantastic. Too old to be filmed gagging on worms and storming off in a dudgeon from a bunch of easy-tanning, turquoise-toe-ring-wearing French people, and too handsome for a death ride in space with four brave, minging loons bound for terminal glory.

Still, Mum would say I’m not a total loser. Maybe I’ve got a kind face or something, because every homeless person in CharmingVille has popped a box on the ground and is sleeping in my doorway. Perhaps the five-ohs down on 108 were bored inbetween guarding the tumbleweeds in Freedom Park and filing their pinky nails into nasal specula and decided on a rout. Perhaps for street people, like everyone else, a change is as good as a holiday. However they ended up down my neck of the ‘hood I don’t have the heart to move them, especially since the lady who sleeps on top of a giant Hello Kitty sweeps my front porch every morning. There’s also that woman with the water bottle collection and the yellow umbrella-spired cart: the one with the ingenious hammocky concoction up front and that poor little cat on a string. She gives me a toothless grin every morning and it’s like looking in the mirror. How can I send her away?

She’s not the only one doing her bit for us earthbound castoffs. On one of these confusingly multitudinous Chinese New Year’s days I was throwing down a black sesame ice cream and sneering at smokers from my customary riverside nook when I noticed a clade of do-gooding trustafarians in elephant pants, rainbow dreadlocks and surgical gloves picking up rubbish off the boardwalk greenbelt. They didn’t seem like Christians, although God-botherers are cannier these days and do quite well blending in with normal people until BANG, you’re having a Kool-Aid down the Youth Centre with some smiling guitarists. That’s another story. Anyway. Perhaps, they’d been kicked off the island when a dolly mix of assorted goons put the kibosh on that sorry Kazantip jamboree. Perhaps, they were space cadets. Or just innocents abroad. Either way, I gave them a fairy clap. Mars. Venus. Kaliningrad. Whatever planet we’re on, we’re all stars.

Back in my day, high school was called that for a reason. We blazed a lot of viscid bud dawdling through The Baden Powell Memorial Wind Garden and Shrike Reserve on our way to Wednesday afternoon’s squash elective. We’d go in one side of ol’ BP’s dank grove all skippety and hormonally awkward and come out the other end malodorously toasted and sauntering like junior Lebowskis. As word spread that Brett McFarlane was secretly taxing his dad’s wicked hydro and skinning up midweek on the way to the leisure centre, there was a veritable storm surge of terry toweling headbands and Dunlop Volleys coursing through the park. Our physical education teacher was thrilled with the ever-increasing turnout, but visibly crestfallen at our lacklustre form on court. As hungry as a plague of zombie teen locusts we’d swarm the coin-op vending machines after the water ran out in the showers and ransack them of everything except White Knights. The “Mighty Mint Chew” was just too minty and too chewy for us shiftless tokers.

It was around this time that the first ever pocket calculators were allowed in our school, maybe because someone thought our weedy synapses were baked to cinders and we needed all the help we could get, or maybe it was just the future knocking on our slide rules. It seems funny to think of it now, when every first world child demands a laptop on their desk, and every student in CharmingVille is wishing “all nob nob fri gud 9” on their Galaxy Notes. Calculators ain’t nothing in this day and age. But in the era of Star Wars and Close Encounters and electric can openers, these newfangled machines turned parent-teacher evenings into ferocious disputations. Our groovy young science educator, Mr. Graham, who let us call him Bob and had a puka shell choker, was on the side of the grey plastic number crunchers for which we’d all paid a whopping 10 bucks. On the other side was Francine Weglarz, Boyco “The Zit” Weglarz’s mum. Boyco was state accordion champion. His mother was a bit mental and swallowed medication thrice daily. “How will our kids ever learn anything if they have machines to do it for them?” She’d rant, quite presciently as it turns out. And after a few sherries, contraindicated for her brain pills, “The robots are coming, mark my words. Remember 1984”.

Well, Mrs. Weglarz, you might have been clinically insane, but you were on the money. The machines are rising faster than you can say “artificial intelligence” and they’re attacking us in our very own homes.

Alarmingly, there are now TVs available, right here in CharmingVille, which listen to your most intimate conversations and pass on secret personal information to the fridge, or the toaster, or whatever. Are we just one step closer to Francine Weglarz’s domestic dystopia? After marital imperatives and necessary ablutions, being sat in front of the telly is my most private and intimate me-time. I hate to think the 40-inch box on my wall is passing judgment as I’m rocking my barely-there tropical onesies, tweezing in-growns and taunting the pet, for example.

It may be all that weed I smoked in the ‘70s, or the dypso tinfoil hatters down Walkabout may actually be right for once. But this creepy internet of things has finally hit my adopted, analogue hometown – the one with all the people and the noise and the stink that makes it soulful and human and unexpectedly fun. Sunday afternoon date-strolls through Sunsimexco or Nojima will never be the same. Those rice cookers are vicious fuckers when riled.

We’re still ahead of the curve when it comes to Personal Transportation Pods. Heathrow spent 40 million dollars on a fleet of eerily vacant capsules that take you short distances and comfortably seat four. Okay, so our versions run on stinking fossil fuels and have no idea where they’re going, but what do you expect for two bucks – it’s a small price to pay to keep our human primacy intact.

But if last week’s news is anything to go by, the end is nigh. A Korean woman got her hair sucked off by her robot vacuum cleaner. It mistook her for a dust kitty while she was napping on the shag pile – what she was doing down there with her appliances powered up is a mystery to us all. Perhaps there was some sweet Seoul skunk involved just prior. She survived the homebot’s overzealous restyle, but not before someone in emergency services posted an ignominious shot of her, face down with the droid mounting her crowning glory all over the internet. Machines – 2, humanity – 0.

As a junk junkie and idle spendthrift subsisting on an ever shorter shoestring, I need retail thrills that won’t shrink my paltry nest egg to the point where I’m hawking what’s left of my earthly shit to tuppenny hagglers on CPN. I also need a raison d’etre, no matter how flimsy, for every purchase, otherwise I feel I’m just wasting those dwindling dollars on more unnecessary tat…oh…never mind. Anyway. This week I enabled myself with a shopping excuse combo so exciting it made me squeal out loud when I thought of it: Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year. Weeeeee!!!

First stop for frittering was the air conditioned faux Ginza luxe of the Japanese bargain shops at Aeon. Muji they ain’t, but still, I came away $9.50 lighter and reasonably satisfied with five things that only me and a tween pachinko savant from Roppongi Hills could appreciate. My lunar-n-love-themed haul included a ballpoint pen with a heart that lights up for Hubster on the 14th, cotton balls, pipe cleaners and craft glue that will have Bunster nailing a miniature three-legged mouflon come February 19.

Despite these satisfactory purchases at my favorite Nipponarium, I felt a nagging lack, specifically in the oriental ovine department. I needed a lot of spangles, a lot of red fringes and something overtly sheepy, Chinesey and/or cheesy to bring in this New Year 4713. Only one thing for it: O’Russei.

Oh, O’Russei. You messy, stinking, glorious basket case of market porn. Your vendors are ruder than Russian, and your floor plan more confusing than Escher on crack. You’re a daunting, ramshackle Babylon that shames the rest of CharmingVille’s wannabe souks. You make Olympic look like Westfield Milton Keynes. Or all of Canberra, Australia.

There’s no air, no air con, and I’ve never seen a fire exit. Between the barrow boys hauling bushels of plastic lobsters and the stout, shouty bean dragons perched atop their leguminous sacks, surely I’d find a modestly priced homage, in paper or plastic, to this New Year’s astrological animal: a woolly, jolly green jumbuck.

It’s nice to see the peaceable sheep get a guernsey this festive turnover. What quiet achievers those amiable, flocculent fellows are in life and, well, served with Auntie Shirley’s mint sauce. Unless you’re an overweening herbivore, an observant Jain, or it’s Lent, roast lamb knows no colour or creed. It’s the equal opportunity protein, the dove to pork’s hawk. The ovine Dalai Llama.

I’ve known sheep all my life. I was cast as a manger lamb every nativity play at Sunday school. Back in those days I didn’t enjoy getting around on all fours and making animal noises as much as I do now, but it was better than being a tree or that shady old perv, Joseph.

As a vexatious teen, my parents resorted to dramatic threats with “The Jam Spoon,” back when it was perfectly acceptable to give your recidivist kids a damn good thwack on the arse with a wooden kitchen tool. My parents, bless their magenta bellbottoms, were hopeless disciplinarians, so they hit on the perfect way to rid themselves of the dauntless jezebel I’d become: they’d hurl me onto some tiny, turbo prop Tassie-bound plane and off to Grandpa’s sheep farm. Down there, I’d steal Gran’s cooking sherry, then spend weeks angsting around the paddocks, pretending I was in Wuthering Heights. My only companions were the odd, staggering mixamatosed rabbit and hundreds of woolly Suffolks staring at me quietly, shifting from leg to leg, as I raged and sobbed, high and low in hormone hell. On my recent trip to the Nordics, I rummaged through the woolly pelts of half a dozen mild mannered flock mates, soothing my frostbitten hands in their lanolined fleece. I watched naked wethers exit shivering from an old tin shearing shed at a friend’s place. I know goats ain’t sheep, but near enough according to my personalised online oracle. Every time I visit the folks I head straight for the petting zoo with pockets full of pellets and paper and make those little tinkers do tricks for hours on end. And who doesn’t love those bouncy, fluffy stars from YouTube: the skittery, joyful sheep who thinks he’s a dog, the goats boinging up and down on a sheet of tin, and the adorable lamb ‘n’ rhino biffies in the phone ad.

It’s a green ram/goat year this year. Honorouble Google tells me we’ll be bathed in harmonious, tranquil yin energy, coexisting with others without conflict or harm. This doesn’t surprise me. With under a hundred mild eyes on Grandaddy’s sheepy lot, my rage against everything dwindled to a pathetic bleat. Back at O’Russei I was suddenly divinely calm, despite the Faustian din, having purchased the quintessential CNY decoration: an anthropomorphic anime lamb dressed like a palace eunuch in a gold cheongsam and perky Qing toque. These placid, unruffled ungulates are onto something. Let’s hope that the warring world wakes up under a nice soft, woolly blanket next Thursday. Gong Xi Fa Baa.

Life’s full of big questions that have yet to be answered to my satisfaction. For example, where does all the food from Masterchef go? They reckon Gordon does a fancy fry up for the crew after the contestants have schlepped back to their squalid auberge, but I find that hard to swallow. I reckon he grabs a bottle of bubbles and helms the Ramsey signature chopper to his Vegas gastropub before you can say “deconstructed wild squirrel pie.” And why is the actor who plays the scientist in the Darlie ad wearing a flesh-coloured deep V-neck under his white coat? It’s not a wardrobe choice I would have made to convey “unconvincing but innocuous expert toothpaste researcher looking at microscope in fake studio lab.” He is both unconvincing and nocuous in that get-up – I can see his chest pelt sprouting out the top. He’s got a gateway beard too. Man-bush and toothpaste lead me inexorably to hairs on soap. These questions keep me up all night, and not in a way I like.

My pre-eminent ponderment this past month is: where are all the other proper animals in the greater CharmingVille area? Why do I only see rheum-eyed cats and bow-legged Franken-dogs with unfortunate dentition, and that perpetually indignant monkey taunting ladyboys at Wat Phnom? Why are there only sparrows and sky rats, and one forlorn kestrel or similar no-mates raptor soaring Naga’s air con thermals? Why are there only rodents and roaches and 56 kinds of ants? Where are the koupreys and the leopards and the long-toed stints? The giant Cantor toitles and the Pileated gibbons? I guess I just answered my own question – this town is so full of imported prowlers and gluttons and home wreckers that everyone else has upped sticks and headed to the Cardamoms or is resting in peace in some enormous celestial ark, at last immune to the pillage of our terrestrial, domestic menagerie of doom. We needy bipeds have a lot to answer for.

Antipodeans like to think we got dibs on nature’s best bits. Our cuddliest animals are like fluffy aliens or experiments gone adorably wrong. But the tradeoff for having the world’s cutest fauna is that we also get the worst miscreants nature has to offer. In the universe’s sudden death version of rock-paper-scissors, the box jelly or the blue-ringed octopus beat a paltry lion king hands down, and they don’t even have hands. And did you see that prehistoric living fossil, the uncalled-for frilled shark, hauled aboard off Melbourne’s coast last week? 300 teeth and 80 million years, people. Within a stone’s throw of the MCG. Hey Vancouver, you can keep your prosthetic-eyed copper rockfish, eh.

While it’s not strictly alive, there’s enough roadkill on Australia’s lonesome highways to keep any larder chock full of meal ideas for families on the go. Even in our concrete jungles and our ticky tacky conurbations nature gets all up in our grills. We have CBD-savvy snakes on a plane and on the trains, possums in schoolbags and scorpions in sneakers. We have city slick koalas and kangaroos and, while they’re not exactly roaming the streets in packs and weeing on your lawn, they’ve been known to punch out a few laps in the community pool, or hole up down the trolley park at the local Ikea. You won’t see a tiger wandering round Aeon of a Sunday arvo.

Without an exotic creature to poke a stick at, I was ready to write off Cambodia’s vestigial indigenous and, now possibly late, fauna. I’d almost assigned those mythic beasts to the melancholy lists of wonderful Khmer things that didn’t make it to 2015, thanks to us. And there are some. But on an unexpected layover in Kep I chanced upon a lively pantheon of wondrous wildlife that made me rethink my Big Smoke-y view. A foot-long millipede bustling along my bathroom wall. A baby snake that was unfortunately bashed to death with a decisive flip-flop by an overzealous pool boy. Hey ho. A ginger squirrel raiding a groaning milk-apple tree. A battalion of big red ants on a log. And a lot of showy butterflies, one of which I was later able to identify as a Painted Jezebel.

It’s all very well to whinge about how gross roaches are, or big myself up for scoffing a novelty cricket. But maybe there is cool wildlife around: not to be pilloried, eaten or annihilated, but admired and ooh-ed over, even in town, and I’m just not looking hard enough. So I joined Natural Cambodia’s Facebook page, and sent them a picture of a black thing on legs. A dung beetle apparently. That led me to a page on bird watching – you can find around 400 species, flocks of which reside in our fair hamlet. And who knew, but there are vulture restaurants out in the sticks where eco-centric villagers kill a cow and serve it up to endangered red-headed, white-rumped and slim-billed old world ornithoids.

Enthusiasts and scientists roaming the Kingdom will drop their pocket protectors to joyfully identify what you’ve seen, along with its proper name. They’re not complaining about the traffic, trying to sell used plastic kitchenware or whining about the price of a decent happy ending. They’re out and about, snapping jeweled green caterpillars, posting Floricans in flight and sharing trap camera shots of elusive jungle cats. It makes me want to learn Latin, buy binoculars and wear a mesh camo jacket with plenty of pockets. But a magnifying glass would probably do for a start. According to actual experts, a lot of Cambodia’s wildlife is alive and well, and apparently right before my eyes.

Love is in the air. Everywhere I look around there’s canoodling sparrers a-chitter and love-struck man-buns holding hands with doe-eyed elephant pants. Flirty girlfriends nuzzle their boy racer dandies: the wind in their ombres and bubble tea-for-two on their minds. If I listen carefully I can almost hear my newly besotted American bud doing lumbersex with her latest beardy Euro-squeeze all up in her Wat Langka loft. Normally glued to her gadgets, she hasn’t updated her status for days, so I’m assuming they’re at it like a couple of Yukon Hares.

All traffic jams lead to swags of silver sprayed coconuts dangling from rose-coloured wedding erections, and for once nobody seems to mind. My pearly invites have yet to hit the doormat but that’s not a bad thing. I won’t have to feel guilty about not going and not wearing a polyester lime satin prom gown, heels and six inches of makeup, or resentful that I have to give a complete stranger $50 to do so. If that’s what folks here are into fine, but where I come from they’d normally be paying me for that kind of thing.

Though it’s not springtime in Paris, Charmingville’s delightful winter weather means everyone’s feeling their oats, and most likely somebody else’s too. The Bunster’s hormones are off the charts since his spay date was postponed thanks to an 11th hour reprieve – his vet eloped with the anaesthetist after a late-night rummage ‘round her groaning medicine chest. No one likes to reach for the remote during an Idol ad break and instead make contact with a suspiciously and emphatically moist patch twixt the Conran couch cushions. So we’ve had to cover every cleft of his deeply studded paramour – the ever-faithful Chesterfield – in prophylactic PVC while he’s hot to trot. This may actually have the opposite, undesirable effect of making the little tinker even randier. I can’t blame him. God knows a few metres of wet plastic and a hefty inanimate object are hard to resist even for those most jaded libertines among us.

Yes indeedy, how pleasantly loved up this weather makes us, and how purty our balmy hamlet is to do it in, especially with those twinkle-dripping trees up ‘round the Monument, like City Hall went all Avatar and blew their 2015 budget on fairy lights. For once, I love what they’ve done with the place. Not even their wastrel offspring disturbing the peace in their gull-winged, tiny-winky-wagons, T-boning parked cars and setting all the dogs off can coitus interrupt us in our quest for les liaisons romantiques in Cupid’s soft tropic gloam.

Which brings me to the usually taciturn Hubster. His idea of a nice evening together is Skyping me from the petanque club and propping his phone up with a can of ABC so I can watch him play with his cabal of, nota bene darling, divorcé teammates.

But perhaps it was the seductive perfume of the flowering romdoul, or the call of the open car park, that prompted his change of heart. This past Monday we mounted his moto and took a ride in the breezy neon evening over the dragon bridge to the concrete boulevards of Koh Pich.

You don’t want to blink. It’s been six months since I was last there, at a wedding as it happens. It’s still the bastard sandpit born of dirty money and breathtakingly poor taste, but it’s not the limbo wasteland it once was, at least, not in the dark. The tumbleweeds have rolled over and out and the place is bustling with Chinese constructors and floodlit pile drivers banging on into the night. And they’re not the only ones. In an effort to find private nookie-nooks away from prying parents wherein to mingle and spoon, middle class singles seeking likeminded fun lovers are tailgating en masse in the vast concrete lots next to those cod-classical wedding sheds. They come prepared with folding chairs and playlists of angsty Khmer pop and Selena Gomez power ballads, coolers and cards, their trunk-mounted woofers booming from car to car in ambitious hopes they’ll clinch a late-night booty call, or at least a funny Valentine.

My  Life Partner and I zoom by aboard our modest Dream, free from traffic to roam and weave round the black streets like wannabe hellions on the tear. Our soundtrack is always the same – two wonky songs belted out at the top of our lungs – You Are My Sunshine (just the chorus, since who knows how the rest of it goes?) and Wimoway, which is perfect for two howling parts and increasingly hysterical falsetto. It ain’t pretty, but it’s fun. If one of these electric nights you’re out on the prowl, prick up your ears. The lion might be sleeping, but nobody else is.

This week the sweet, lispy trainee began his till tenure at the pointy end of my local Panda Mart, and I was his first customer. I was buying four chocolate-coated ice creams on sticks.

You know how you’re compelled to tell your hairdresser or the taxi guy all sorts of shit that isn’t remotely true (I can do krav maga), or is so shamefully true (I like a Justin Bieber song, but only that one with Usher, but not Usher per se), but either way you just don’t understand why it’s coming out of your mouth? So I was burbling away and I told the lad the ice creams were for me and the Hubster.

It was a big fat lie. The plan all along was to scoff them unaided, in toto, the moment I got behind closed doors. Because calcium – obviously – to stop me breaking a hip and never getting out of that assisted living facility alive, but mainly ‘cos I’m a sulky no-mates in the afternoons since PPCTV lost FoxCrime and replaced Bobby Goren with DIVA. Which is ok when SVU is on because who doesn’t love Mariska Hargitay, but most of the time there are just those god-awful Telemundo soaps with dire American overdubbing.

But anyway. The lad was chirpy and a bit ditzy and camp as a row of tents. All of which was mildly entertaining, except that he called me mama throughout my perfidious babble.

“Hello mama. What’s your name mama?” like he’d learned English from Kanye. Not Madame, or Sister, Bong Srey or even Sir – all of which I’ll answer to. Mama caught me off guard. Oh happy days. Someone else who mistakenly thinks I’m up the duff and not biblically obese. Eat your heart out Eglon the Moab.

Like a camel I have three stomachs, unless you count the pouch under my chin, which is kind of a holding bay in case there’s a buffet. If you’ve seen me standing in profile, you’ll know the way to my heart is through them. So not counting my mandibular scoff pocket there’s my top tummy, which sits just above my big middle paunch, that cantilevers over the cheeky underhang that no amount of that hot Floyd Mayweather’s ringside ab workout’s gonna fix. I got this way from eating a fair bit over quite some time and not really exercising unless you count going down the shop and then back up two flights of stairs carrying approximately 300 grams of ice cream.

I haven’t inflated this pneumatic physique on normal snacks alone. As a guest in CharmingVille and the wife of a bloke who fries a mean bat, I’ve given the weirder items on the dark menu a red hot go. On our first date The Hubster squired me to a hammock restaurant and we spent a pleasant afternoon miscommunicating and feasting on Coca-Cola chicken washed down with warm Heineken. It wasn’t bad at all.

Even Bayon is importing weird foods that only people who do yoga can pronounce. So today I made something called a quinoa and chia seed milk smoothie. I put in some comfortingly familiar banana and was just sitting down to feel self-righteous and watch some goats jumping on a bit of tin on YouTube when I received a disturbing Viber photo from my Life Partner, who was lurking down the local man-cave so he wouldn’t have to taste any of my internet recipe experiments.

Without my glasses I thought it was a close-up of some baby pandas being born. Icky but maybe cute later. It was definitely black and white but, specs on, turned out to be a big fat mess of wetly bloated larvae – plus a peppering of black nippers and a very distinct waspy carapace. Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve chowed down in a Koh Dach jungalow on red ants and the tiniest piece of roast rat. I’ve picked spider legs out me choppers with a cricket stick at Skun and supped on barbied snake in the privacy of my own home. I’ll even inhale a durian at the drop of a hat. So there are a lot of disgusting things I’ve done in my life – quite a few have to do with food – but you won’t see my mouthparts anywhere near duck webs, eggs with flyblown embryos inside them, puppies, and centipedes in rice wine. And I draw the line at hornet larvae now too.

When news went round our neighbourhood petanque league on the tuk tuk grapevine that killer drones had set up shop in a mango tree behind the museum, every man and his bruv hustled round there with sticks, smoke and a point of view on how to cook ‘em just right. Just the thought of it had me mentally wind-milling away and grabbing my metaphorical EpiPen. As soon as I clapped eyes on Hubster’s stir-fry of death my throat closed over. But someone else told me they’re not so bad. Not at all just like chicken, but worth a go, even if you’re not a Gryllsian prepper or a precocious teen chef looking for wanky new restaurant ideas, or one of the 6 billion entomophages the rest of us gutless wonders share a planet with. And after all I guess honey is just bee vomit.