Byline: Ruby Smith

Experimental space animals around the world took stock last week after five Russian sex geckos fell off the twig mid-orbit. On paper it sure looks glamorous as hell up there. For the go-getting chimp or the adventurous fruit-fly swarm, it can seem like a decent chance to get out of the rat race and, you know, really make a difference while rumpscuttling like billy-o on the company dime. Plus when you’re off the clock there are all those white cat-suits and Perspex furniture and intergalactic caped folk swizzling electric-blue cocktails. But the shine wears off once the suns go down and the temperature plummets. As endearing as it is to be able to lick your own eyeballs, things get complicated at -270°c. In the case of the doomed Foton M-4 mission, the heaters failed and those brave little tinkers became reptilian icicles frozen in flagrante. Bravo, you scaly cosmonauts. And sadly, Vale.

Back down on planet CharmingVille, our resident lagomorph needs no interstellar inducement to live up to his ilk’s own pithy idiom and fuck like a rabbit. The Bunster’s libido knows no boundaries, terrestrial or otherwise. He just does it everywhere, 24/7, mounting chairlegs, grunting over prostrate couch cushions and giving what for to anything else he can sink his rodentures into while doing so. They don’t tell you this about rabbits when you get one. Or maybe they do, but not nearly enough. They don’t tell you that rabbits have grim little sex faces. It’s tremendously disconcerting. They also don’t tell you he’ll grow grotesque, high-visibility nads the size of poached eggs. You don’t believe that either ‘til dinner guests point and laugh, with the result that you’re having the lads at Nek Reach run up some modesty pants prior to the next at-home knees-up to protect his feelings. Because despite their relentless stamina as shaggers, rabbits are sensitive fellows, and they’ll soon show you if they’re sick, embarrassed or just plain pissed off.

We knew our furry faux child was deathly ill when he ignored his airflown Polish dill and stopped leaving annoying balls of crap all over the balcony. It was nice to hang out the washing barefoot without wincing on a rock-hard arse pebble. But our fellow could barely raise his little face, let alone anything else, from his favourite bobble mat by the window. When next door’s massively testicled cat sauntered past, our fellow nary batted an eye. Screams from the neighbourhood mad person, drunk tuk tuk fights, the nightly Whitney drag show across the street and the neighbour’s all-hours angle grinding had no effect whatsoever. An impotent, constipated, thump-free Bunster? Vladivostok, we have a problem.

Hubster and I took turns through the evening trying to encourage him to shit and eat. I watched YouTube massage videos and learned all about gastro-intestinal stasis. By 3am I was Google-deep in BinkyLand, a parallel universe chockers with well-meaning and knowledgeable rabbit lovers but also alien abductees, really bad fonts and people who eat paint. For sure I could smell wet dog hair and formaldehyde right through the computer. It wasn’t all underbelly, though: at 3.45 I got on to some Canadian dude called Rodrigo who was possibly a vet and who gave me list of drugs he thought might help. I’m not sure about his brother’s favourite speedball recipe, but the tips on paediatric simethicone seemed legit. He had me tearfully in a tuk tuk and on de la Gare’s doorstep at dawn’s crack.

Back at Marital HQ we prepared for the worst as our fluffy ginga lay curled up in my armpit, licking me weakly where just 12 hours before he’d been maniacally rooting a hole in it. I was sure if there was one thing worse than watching him meekly expire at home, it would be witnessing the supposedly inevitable heart attack that all the rabbit aficionados warned about and that I feared would happen on the way to a sketchy CharmingVille vet. Taking him in a tuk tuk in a plastic chicken basket tied with string would just about do it. Eventually there was nothing for it; our bloke’s only got three legs and he was on the last of them. But the vet turned out not to be sketchy at all and was waiting in scrubs with a comforting smile as we held our sweaty bunny on the table. My tear strings could hold the floodgates no longer. As he panted bravely in my arms, my eye drops rained with a clang onto the steel countertop. The vet checked him all over: the situation was not as dire as we’d feared, and I started to feel better. Then with a flourish she stuck a thermometer up his arse. I saw a faint but tell-tale flicker in his eye. Oh Bunster, you randy bugger. Welcome back.

 

It’s just about good old mid-Autumn Festival again, and I’ve got auspicion on my mind. If you live anywhere north of 178, there’s a lot of banging on drums, clashy cymbals and atonal singing. Perfect. There are fake hundred-dollar bills just lying in the gutter, which have me reflexively reaching, pulse racing, every single time. You’ll also get an eyeful of a lot of topless guys wearing yellow satin lion legs, and that’s never a bad thing.

I’m not Chinese per se, but I yearn to fit in. To make sure our little one-rabbit gang of three embraces the harvest spirit in our ‘hood, I’ve fashioned corn-husk leggings and a little cornucopia hat for The Bunster. He’s not thrilled, but he gets where I’m coming from.

Instead of his phone torch, I make the Man of the House carry a tulip lantern on a stick to take out the garbage every night. Happily I don’t have much to do to go Sino because I got both sleeves and full back ink depicting the Manchu Conquest with specific focus on the Seven Grievances Declaration of 1618. So I just sit on the balcony a lot with my shirt off and hope that someone notices.

Best of all there’s plenty of mooncakes for breakfast. Gee whiz, you can get a terrific mooncake in CharmingVille. Unlike the olden days, when you could only buy imported ones mass produced in the notorious pastry sweatshops of Guangdong, you can now get top quality ones crafted right here in our five-star kitchens.

So on Tuesday I put pants on and went to Aeon to buy a laundry hamper and came out empty handed in the hamper department, but with two cactuses, a Pikachu phone charger and a stent–load of exotically packaged pig fat and sugar. I bought three.

Holy crap. You’d think they were made from the actual moon given how much they cost. I spent my whole month’s tuktuk allowance. But the boxes have jade rabbits on them, and you may know I’m partial to rabbits, regardless of their creed. Plus there’s a surprise inside, like an egg or a nut or some smokey bacon, which I categorically do not recommend.

My two Chinese friends – I say that, but technically one’s Malaysian and the other one’s from Hoboken, but needs must – turned up to my work and we ate those lunar lumps together, prising thick gobbets of sesame and lotus paste off the rooves of our mouths with pots and pots of peppermint tea.

For some extra authenticity I made them talk Chinese – it could have been anything for all I know, but it sounded really real – and we watched a couple of episodes of Monkey for a bit. But you don’t have to be a pretend Chinese person or from NooJoizy to love a dirty big box of mooncakes. Just this last week in Chengdu, a wily panda faked a bun in the oven so she could get round–the-clock pats, climate control and a daily bushel of lotus-stuffed delights. And she’s not the only ursine hustler around. Pandas, in general, are canny buggers.

Ding Dong and Bang Bang shamelessly wangled a 10-year sex-for-rent programme at an Australian zoo, gouging 10 million smackers from witless taxpayers to fund a decade walking slowly, eating shitloads of free stuff, fucking like animals and baring their big round arses to hordes of Chinese tourists and exchange students from Singapore – the only people who can afford to pay the extortionate entrance fee.

Those furry tricksters also cut a sweet deal on merch spin-offs, which included a line of ‘Panda-Sutra’ stubby holders and an exercise video. You can take the panda out of the country, etc, etc.

Duotone bear or not, everyone has a secret sweet tooth, and with the Hubster’s birthday just days away, I’ve been considering all manner of cakery to top with candles and embarrass him with in a public place. Some kind of croquembouche-style mooncake stack might be novel, but given the breathtaking pricetags it would mean I can’t buy him the cow he’s been after.

Certainly, a panda is out of the question.

 

Yesterday, I was having a nice quiet coffee at a Riverside caff, listening to prog rock and spelunking Buzzfeed’s cavernous gullet for a diverting new quiz. As I chanced on that video of a cat dressed as a shark going round and round on the robot vacuum cleaner, I sensed a bustle in the universal hedgerow and looked up to see a posse of lustrous black cars beetling towards the kerb. They almost eighty-sixed the bracelet urchins and the sunglasses guy and sent two paranormally tall, flaxen flashpackers skittering into a wing of fagging sexpats inhaling their hangover brunch. It was quite the spectacle.

I don’t know if you remember the olden days, but you used to get those little surprises in breakfast cereal packets. A swap card with a football star: collect the whole team! Or a snap-together plane complete with little stickers for the fuselage. Or a Crater Critter. Apparently you could also get driving licenses. The dipsticks behind the wheels of these particular vehicular thugs were undoubtedly Fruit Loops’ bitches back in the day. Or they just went down the cop shop and handed over 40 smackers and a slab of ABC. Either way.

Once the monkey suited bridge-trolls in the wood-bead seat covers had ‘parked’ the Tundra and the Escalade and the Bentley with the white stickers still underneath the door handles into a gigantic traffic-jam-shaped clusterfuck, a single gormless twat descended from each back seat and swaggered in. I could tell from what they were shouting into their phones, held at cigar length from each piehole and with the speaker turned on, that Mr Tiny Penis, Mr Miniscule Todger and Mr ‘Scanning Electron Microscope’ Littledick were not from around these parts. I’m not being sizeist; I know they all had bijou bedsnakes because they had teensy weensy little baby hands. Plus they sported the Pan-Asian casual business stylee of the rich and tasteless that don’t leave much to the mind’s eye. 1. Knock-off ManU strip, Ping cap, booze belly and some fantastical golf pants obviously purchased from a travelling dwarf circus. Gold and diamond pinky ring the size of a rabbit testicle. #2. Unctuous comb-over, lemon popped-collar polo tucked into high-waisted, nut-sundering cargoes, dress belt. Moobs. #3. Details sketchy; I was mesmerised by the inch-long fingernails and the goitre. And the sunnies on the back of his head. Sorry.

I know I’m the blackest pot sashaying down life’s catwalk: I’ve got exactly the same hair as I did in high school and I haven’t owned anything ironable since 1981. Plus I’m on the blousy side, and not in a good way. But that doesn’t mean I can’t mercilessly shit on anyone else’s touted taste and talents. Just like I don’t play the ukelele, sing in a fake Jamaican accent or wear a cheeky chappie hat, but I’m a fucking expert on how many ways Jason Mraz sucks. I’m a stone-cold oracle when it comes to that sanctimonious, ferret-faced whine-meister. You’re so not mine, mate.

But almost without exception, 14 Hilarious Eyebrow Fails is enough to distract me from these and other sartorial ignominies in the parade of wardrobe catastrophes that shamelessly promenades CharmingVille’s riverine shores. Under normal circumstances I could have forgiven, or even ignored, the three amigos and their laughable attempt at resort wear if they’d alighted from a Camry and sat in a corner giggling over teacup ponies or lame Canadian gag shows that everyone seems to adore except me. But those punkass millionaires really got my goatskin legwarmers, especially after their sweet rides left the street kids and the sunnies dude flailing on the pavement with their livelihoods spilt all around. It didn’t help that they were sat at the next table engaged in some ostentatious nad rearrangement and talking loudly about some massive LUXURY yacht they’d just come off. In case you didn’t hear me, it was a LUXURY yacht, and the guy who owned it was a VERY IMPORTANT guy. Where’s my LUXURY bucket?

At this point I realised I’d anxiety sucked way too much Ventolin and needed a lie down at Marital HQ. Just as I scrabbled for plastic, the previously skittled blonde duo ducked through the door and sauntered like human giraffes to my now empty table. The cashed-up little prats next to them pretended not to notice, but the jabber petered out as those long drinks of water ordered mango lassis, chitchatted with their throats as the Dutch are wont to do, and emptied a plastic bag onto the table for all the world to see. Out clattered four pairs of broken three-buck RayBans which the couple arranged neatly as they spoke. Except for Jethro Tull fluting away and the tourists’ husky natter, you could have heard a pin drop. It was fucking brilliant.

I put my own sunnies on to cover up my celebratory teardrops of justice-well-served and stepped onto the pavement. I almost turned back to thank those freaking giants, but I stopped myself just in time. Those foreigners may have been good Samaritans, but a crime of fashion had still occurred. It’s a sad fact that there are so few elephants left in Cambodia. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for elephant pants.

 

Me and The Hubster both get Mondays off. When each one rolls around, it’s just like Christmas at Marital HQ. But not that exciting beginning bit of Christmas where little baby Jesus pops out to the delight of rapturous livestock, and you sing along with Bing while someone cracks a frosty bottle of champers and you unwrap granny’s old baubles together. It isn’t Noel’s joyous front part at all.

Except for one jolly time when we dressed Bunster in a reindeer cardigan, our days off resemble the arse-end of Yule; that bit from about midday where you gorge yourself into a food coma and doze in and out of A CSI Xmas: The Musical. I prefer Mother’s Little Helpers to the ones that Santa has, so like clockwork after the inevitable post-prandial spat we go our separate ways. I hit the sack with my Ikea app, a Xanax and a glass of warm milk. Hubster and his work-shy mates get on the turps down the median strip and bet on shit that only drunk Khmer men care about. God’s own papoose would be spinning in his manger.

So lately I’ve been trying to keep Hubster off the toddies and me off the dolls both at the same time. It’s why I thought fridge shopping this past Monday would keep us, for another seven days at least, safely behind the handrails on that slippery slope to mutually enabled destruction.

Other people might think six hours trawling CharmingVille’s myriad home appliance emporia in the company of a deaf, geographically challenged tuk tuk guy might actually drive one to self-medicate. But I’m quite particular about my white goods. For a start, they’re better actually white. From bitter experience as an OCD surface wiper with a penchant for sleep-eating, I know that an all-night, fridge-side salami bender leaves more fingerprints on stainless steel than Horatio Caine’s had hot dinners.

So 8am Monday and we’re holding hands in the back of the tuk tuk, chipper as all get out and so far intoxicant-free. I got plastic and a list of simple features we want in our new cool housemate.

1. White
2. The freezer part sensibly on the bottom
3. About head height
4. Icemaker preferred, but not a deal breaker

Like container loads of Korean fabric featuring the stylised beaver logo of a defunct Seoul maternity hospital (I’m not lying about this) and accident cars with Montana plates or ‘Whars Mah Boomstick’ decals, Bodes gets a lot of stuff nobody else wants.

We can add grey fridges to that list. In the rest of a world gone cray cray for colour, stainless, gunmetal, charcoal, dust and dove are so yesterday. If you fancy a magenta fridge or an avocado fridge or a black fridge or god forbid a white one, you can just snap your fingers and it gets wheeled right in by Matthew McConaughey in short shorts, apparently.

On the other hand, if you lay all the grey fridges in CharmingVille end to end, they would reach from Wat Phnom to the North Pole and back. There are so many that everyone could have his or her own choice of a personal plungepool or a Doctor Fish place. We could bring back the water festival with a monochromatic armada of tonally understated Panasonic frost-free inverters.

Most of them are cheap plastic that may or may not look like stainless steel. Some of them have two doors and TVs and ice makers and drink dispensers and mirrors and biometrics. With the really fancy ones you can ring it up on your way home and get it to tell your microwave to heat up that bit of pasta bake for dinner. I don’t give a shit. None of them are white, head height and with the freezer part sensibly at the bottom.

Except for one. On the verge of giving up and day drinking at Cat House, we found it upstairs in Sorya. It was exactly what we wanted, but covered in dings and scratches like it’d been in a fight. You never know what goes on in these places after everyone goes home. We made a loud and detailed inspection and soon attracted a crowd of dull-eyed shop assistants. I argy-bargied with the alpha dolt about the utter futility of a warranty, given its condition and all. After minutes of making stuff up that he knew that I knew even he wasn’t convinced about, he grinned and pointed to all the other fridges. “See, madame,” he explained. “All of them are broken, so that’s OK then.” It was true. They were all a bit fucked up, scratched and dented from careless handling and/or after-dark appliance fight club, but they’d most likely work OK given a bit of care and attention. Like the crappiest presents under the tree, they might fall apart next week, but for now let’s just take one Happy Monday a day at a time.

The other day I was sitting in my pants on the balcony with a peppermint tea and a mirror plucking my eyebrows and looking for things to squeeze. Birds were tweeting and the disco pickle man was cycling past with Cher’s Do You Believe cranked up to supersonic. It was nice and breezy weatherwise in CharmingVille and The Bunster was frolicking at my feet as best he could on a tile floor with just the three good legs. Yep. It really was great to be out there watching horny man pigeons flapping like billy-o trying to crack onto their heedless lady birds. How I chuckled. I even thought I smelt pancakes. It was so agreeable that though I’m not a fan of those adorable scallywags other people refer to as ‘children’, I started thinking if I had a pair I would call them Moonskin and Playwater. Yes siree. You can have your damn Parises in the Springtime, I scoffed to my now recumbent rabbit. No really, pal. Keep your Lake Districts with yer ramblers and quaint Greek Village courtyards with the wells and the lemon trees and those topless blokes with saucy eyes picking figs in Tuscany. “This is the life, eh Bunster!” I sighed. He wuffled in his sleep. Look at those pretty unicorns.

I was prematurely smug, as it happens. Three words. Motherfucking angle grinders.

I hate those things more than mole hairs and elephant pants. More than brown liquor and more than duckweb salad, and that’s saying something because I really, really hate that shit. And though godawful non-stop house musak in the changerooms at gym is high on my list of sonic abominations, along with those mewling female Khmer voices dubbed over Hong Kong chop-socky movies that the Hubster insists on watching before he goes to work, nothing beats Cambodia’s National Instrument of Aural Torment.

The angle grinder and its strident colluder, the masonry saw, are the defining sounds of Phnom Penh. The medium-size jackhammer comes in a close third. In Moscow it’s car alarms and bottles smashing. Paris it’s sirens. Poor old Aussie gets miles and miles of saddo beeping pedestrian crossings and some type of warbler. But Nomps is thrall to the relentless searing grind of a thousand sleepless machines that furrow my brow with a persistent, power-tool-specific groove in defiance of about 10 girls’ weekends’ worth of Bangkok botox. They drown the Sunday chitter of sparrers and the exotic, hypnotic drone of blessing monks. They interrupt my afternoon trysts with Detective Bobby Goren, my TV boyfriend. The Bunster gets all frantic and thumps. They cut the town – and our peace in it – to shreds.

Trouble is I love home renos. While others draw the curtains, switch on and get off watching erections of another ilk, over on Remodelista I’m gagging for the big reveal of Mike and Sandy’s foyer. I’m hot for Jenny’s small-space makeover. My pupils dilate with pleasure as I trawl Pinterest or Houzz for the perfect Warm Industrial task lighting for my imaginary Bed-Stuy walkup or my minimalist nook in Barceloneta. I’d do anything – really, just tell me what you want – for a shipping-container-cum-shabster-cabin on a Costa Rica outcrop. Give me skylights, kitchen islands, outdoor rainshowers and a rooftop plunge pool. Deep Teal feature walls and Duck Egg dunnies. Before and Afters. Oh I ache.

I’m surprised there ain’t a local show about it, given this town’s appetite for construction. There should be, and I’d be the Judge Judy of shoddy workmanship and egregious design. I’d take a sledgehammer to Sopheap’s choice of salmon and lime for every fucken room in the house. I’d rip up the plans for Leakhena’s ersatz Louis quinze gazebo with life-size Manneken-Pis made of gold. Pass me that crowbar, friend, and let me at those cockroach-camouflaging maroon-granite countertops.

For all its foibles, CharmingVille gets under your skin and, even if you don’t own a place yet, plenty of us are thinking about it and compiling look-books of pins and pix for a new abode. Except for the mittel-European gout-meister who just bought the flat across my street. For the last 50 years it was a fine example of Sangkum-style architecture in an almost pristine block of the same. Since last week old Otto’s been recreating a Bavarian Hofbrauhaus in his third-floor lounge room, complete with 360° stained birch panelling and a giant mug tree, no doubt for his grotesque stein collection. Along with a couple of untethered masons sans spirit level adding a wonky arch across the whole façade and thus obliterating its cool Corbusien bones, I spy a boney kid with a green gingham bonnet and moustache T-shirt wielding what looks to be a six-inch De Walt. If I only I had two bunnies. I could make earmuffs.

 

Am I being overdramatic or has the world gone to Hell in a handbag lately? All the Horsemen seem to be about, gambolling from one ghastly jamboree to the next, lobbing their evil two cents’ of human catastrophe and riding off slapping thigh as the shit hits. These dark days I lie in bed with the World Service looping misery: the planes, the Strip, Our Girls. The greedy oceans filled with drowned ferries and seekers lost, vast floating wrecks of sun-curled flip-flops and gasping animal mariners. In blasted lands everywhere, human beings run for their lives. For the first time since the doomed twins I feel a grim existential weight. Sure, I’m tapering off the Zolpidems. ‘Expect feelings of dread,’ it says on the packet. Cheers for the heads up.

In addition to the imminent invasion by Lizard People in the general rest of the world, shit’s been going down in CharmingVille, too. And it’s not just the usual bag snatches, break-ups, moto dings and death by misadventure. Tumultuous events are taking place and I’m not talking Aeon or the blokes upstairs calling barleys and getting their GRKs off my street corner. Set against the ceaseless lament of evictions, floods, strikes and wedding wars, cars barrel through shop windows, helicopters crash, good people are shot or bailed up in their homes by bags of deadly snakes. Running away doesn’t work. On trips out of town I see more sandfill and less lotus. More rubber and ads for bright orange soylent corn nailed to old-growth stumps. I used to avert my gaze from puppies in cages, upside-down chickens and sunburned pigs on motos. Now I can’t look away.

I’m not being flippant here, but it’s hard for a simpering narcissist like me not to take it personally. Despite its craven injustice, Dadaist politics, stinking piggery, great hawking gobs of slag and unsightly mole hair, CharmingVille has until recently felt welcoming and warm in its own wonky way. Cheap and cheerful. Gritty, true, but hearty with it. Certainly shouty and full of unnecessarily loud singing. But safe. Ish. Safer than Kings Cross or Fitzroy on a Saturday night, anyway. Imperfect, impoverished, anarchic it may be, but it was my little dysfunctional hellhole and I loved it. I don’t like it that I don’t like it so much right now.

I can normally winkle a brightside or a blessing but I got nothin’. Even those YouTube goats don’t cut it. And it’s not just me. “What the fuck is happening?!” exclaimed my usually unflusterable friend. My gentlemanly, self-absorbed, smart, wicked, adventurous, hilarious, kind and loyal friend. We’re in the process of consciously uncoupling since last weekend when, at the tail end of a rare bender, in between me ogling some ladyboys and propping me up on the bar at Cavalry bellowing for Britney, he told me he was leaving.

He’s off to some two-bit ‘Stan to do important work in logistics. I don’t really even know what that is and I don’t care. A lot of nice folks have gone off to big jobs or places with gentrified port precincts and excellent public transportation. I occasionally twinge with envious first-world FOMO, like they’ll be able to drink water out of the tap or be near a Target. But that’s soon outweighed by the smug knowledge that I can walk around practically naked at all times. And that they won’t see too many toddlers riding buffalo down the main drag, no siree. So I go on the boat trip and make them a card. I feel a little bit sad. But sooner or later I’m back happily rubbing along in the CharmingVille life as we know it.

But this goodbye is different, and my usually wry ‘n’ chipper cheeky chica is TKO’d. My mojo is MIA. At gym today I burst into tears during treadmill sprints and had to pretend my blubs were endorphins running out my eyes. Normally I’d meander through lunch with a robust bloody Mary and a nice long read of the paper. Instead I went straight to work and ate a packet of seaweed crackers left over from Secret Santa 2010. Later I stared at our office’s defunct Chinese stone ball water feature. I found a rainy afternoon of sad songs about people saying goodbye, then wrote some maudlin haiku about suns going down and boxes to the left. Listening to the most tragic version of Ashokan Farewell I could find until the light frowsed out, I read all about an American thing called ‘abandonment issues’. I think I might be American because I’ve got them. Yesterday I don’t remember.

But there’s always tomorrow. Though right now there’s a black dog pissing all over my front yard and we’ve got a bunch of mouth-breathing Nazgul scything round our blue planet, I’m pretty sure this downtown downer will disappear once the drugs wear off, my dear friend lets go of my hand, and the milk of human kindness fills everyone’s glass to the brim. Chins Up and Hugs All Round ‘til then.

 

If you’re an office potato who spends all day looking for weird shit on Google Maps or setting up a Facebook page for your loris, you know you need to get out more. Sooner or later you probably won’t be living in tropical CharmingVille. You’ll be shacked up in some freezing cul de sac in a first-world conurbation with a two-hour commute wishing you could chuck on shorts and flip flops, tuk tuk out for an espresso martini, an afternoon of deep-tissue massage, a three-dollar haircut or a pub quiz with a gaggle of crop-topped Scandinavians.

Don’t let that gypsy heart of yours put down its castanets. You made it to the KOW after all – it’s not exactly on the beaten track. At one point you had ants in your pants and they hurt so good. It’s time to give those little buggers a poke, non? Pull a sickie next Friday and/or Monday and take them on a sneaky road trip. I implore, nay, command you.

Go on the bus, by all means. Ride a bike if you’re French. Company Car? Kudos! But for about 60 smackers a day plus petrol you can get a decent SUV that comfortably holds you and three narrow or two plumpster mates, luggage, pillows, esky and a shitload of beers, an English-speaking driver and a ticket to Spider town. Or Crabtastic Kep. You keep saying you want to go to the Kiris. Well, go on then, while there’s still some left.

I admit that our roads, the rain, the bovine contrarians and the many breasted pot-ready dogs loafing out front can turn you into a palpitating Catholic. Just tell yourself it’s good cardio. Sure, a 12-hour drive to cover just 400km is fucking ridiculous. And sometimes boring. But don’t let that dull your youthful sense of adventure. Just plan ahead.

If you’re a multi-tasker and you need more action on the drive than fruitlessly tuning the radio or Instagramming the back of chicken-jammed Korean mini-vans, there are plenty of rewarding things to keep you occupied. Drinking, for starters. Or why not chuck a couple of lamb shanks in tinfoil, sit them on the engine at the Caltex Calmette, and by the time you’ve pulled into Kratie you’ve got yourself a decent feed? Which is a good thing. Kratie has a lot going for it: I love those penis-head dolphins. There’s some spooky architecture and the river is mesmerising even without a big fat spliff. But having supped on squid jerky all the way up, a bamboo stick filled with rice and brown things doesn’t always hit the spot.

I know this because I took my own advice and went to DolphinBurg via Kampong Cham this past weekend. If you’re heading that way you’ll see a lot of drunk guys staggering about. Maybe there was some kind of convention on. Kampong Cham was hammered. Relaxing riverside with an icy cold beer on my first evening I watched a wobbly copper in a wife-beater and uniform pants drive his pink Scoopy inexorably into the back of a stationary minibus. After a few seconds he turned off his bike, parked it in the middle of the road, put on his helmet with POLICE writ large across the back and had a shout with the driver. Dozens of bemused promenaders stopped to see the show. You won’t get that kind of action in downtown Milton Keynes, boy. Pure Cambo comedy gold.

What a top town the KC is. You should go there. There’s an underrated Angkorian temple next to a buffalo wading pool and a big wat with a lot of gambolling monklets. When it’s not rainy season there’s a bamboo bridge across to the island, or a ferry when the bridge is washed away. There’s a French tower thing. You don’t see one of those every day. You can stay at a hotel by the other bridge, the fuck-off spanking Japanese one.

“You have a nice view of our bridge,” said the receptionist proudly when I asked to look at the room. “It’s a new bridge. Enjoy!” As fascinating as 200,000 tonnes of cast concrete can be, I chose a place overlooking the Mekong that had the frisson of mental asylum about it. There was a bunch of born-again Koreans wearing matching T-shirts and praying loudly in reception, which was also disconcerting.

Up on the second floor and along a strangely wide corridor, I found my $18 en suite room. The TV was the size of a cat, but there was cable. Elvis was on, so after a massive dinner on main street I sat on my balmy balcony, drank beer and, in between ethereal Ramadan prayers, hummed along to the King’s most obscure and derivative croons. Clams have never been so happy.

 

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.

 

At 5.30 this morning I woke up to the sound of banging. Not the saucy type. Or next door refitting their fine wine cellar. With a thrill I realised it was me, or at least one of my alter egos, Hot Stevo, knocking about my cranium. Hot Stevo’s a hunky handyman and jack of all trades who lives in one of my mental cul-de-sacs right next door to my inner talk-show host, Lafawnda Jones, and my tortured but brilliant other self, a forensic detective called Linus Novak. This balmy AM, Hot Stevo had on a faded navy wife-beater, short shorts and a pair of steel-capped Blunnies rimed with sweat salt. He waved me a cheeky G’day, slammed shut the tailgate of his muscle ute, and drove off in a cloud of cement dust and vintage Acker Dacker.

It was an unexpected pleasure to see Hot Stevo up dawn’s proverbial with his toolbelt abulge. It augured well for my idle hands and manual cortex, both of which have been a bit rusty lately. Before Hubster and I tied the knot, I was a hammer-savvy single gal who travelled the world fixing her own fuses, sealing her own leaky shower cubicles and rewiring a flat-pack wardrobe with grow lamps. But that’s a whole other packet of TallyHos. Anyhoo. I’ve been known to run like a chunkier Julie Andrews, arms outstretched, down the paint-chip aisle at the nearest Home Depot, my fingertips setting Madder Lakes, Midnights in Vegas and Flouncing Gazelles aflutter. Nothing beats hanging at the charity sausage-sizzle outside Bunnings talking dimmer switches. Unless it’s glues, putties, sealants and solvents. Don’t get me started. Araldite was my crack.

But since I’ve domiciled in CharmingVille, my veteran red tin toolchest – a brimming, fold-out Pandora’s box of hardware porn – has gathered dust kitties propping up the cookbook cemetery under my hand-lathed kitchen island. I’ve lost the will to tinker.

For starters, it’s fucking hot. DIY accoutrements are not mapped out in an easy-to-navigate, one-stop Megamart with air-con switched to Arctic Vortex and bossa nova remixes of Lorde playing while you swap reno intel with a cheery tile fogey in company King Gees. There are no sat-nav trolleys here, let me give you the tip. Looking for that thing for the thing in the bowels of O’Russei is as exhausting and futile as, well, looking for that same thing in the bowels of Tuol Tompong.

Granted there’s that air-conned, reasonably well-lit and organised electrical place on Monivong that’s sometimes got the thing you want. But mostly they’ve got 99 other things and the thing you want ain’t one.

If it’s not scorching, I don’t mind a circuit of Mao Tse Tung when I want to drop a couple of bucks on a brand spanking bidet or backsplash tiles in my favourite shade of Tiffany Dusk. But spare me the fly-blown indifference of those shuffling Dementors at that multi-storey bed ‘n’ bath Bermuda Triangle next to the Bentley ‘n’ Beemer emporium. Hengs. Hangs. Whatevs. If you want to watch someone’s eyes glaze over while they simultaneously rob you of your very being, go there. Fuck. Me. Green.

If I do need anything done around Marital HQ, I generally pay the famous Mr Deth and his assistant, a skinny dude with a BOY cap and an extra-long fingernail to fix whatever needs fixing. That nail. It’s like a Khmer Swiss army knife. I can’t tell you.

Anyway. So how come Hot Stevo’s back in the perfectly dovetailed frame? What awoke my inner handyman and gave me mental wood?

The culprit is my new favourite four-letter word: Aeon.

I was ready to hate the place and follow-up with a scathing diatribe about the beginning of the end for CharmingVille’s charm. I still might. But like every man, woman and child in the universe, I went there on opening day and the first thing I saw was the fresh cactus section, right next to the miniature trowel department. I burst into tears of surprised relief. There was a whole wall of reasonably priced Bosch power tools. New. In boxes. Not hanging by their cords at head height, ready to brain you because you’re too busy scoping for fire exits, just in case.

Barely sensate with unexpected joy, I bought some wood putty. It came with a little spatula snapped into the lid. The polite and well-informed salesperson stepped up to help. They had shoes on. I hyperventilated with happiness and had to go to Burger King to comfort eat. After that it was the $1.90 shop where I bought the Bunster some self-stick carpet patches for his disabled stairs, cup hooks, and a set of mini wrenches for the bike. Later I got some hot Japanese guy to give me handy tips on smoke alarms. It was right then I noticed Hot Stevo doing some landscaping with his shirt off. He was beaming. He told me he was planning a sausage sizzle later, and I should bring a slab. Youse are all invited.

 

When I was 10 I hurled all over the handbag department in Macy’s, San Francisco.

The eye-watering miasma from an adjacent fragrance counter, the hot fug of a superheated winter shop and a gutful of warm Orange Julius were too much for this little hippie. As my mortified, tether-end mother tissued the ralph off an oxblood Aigner saddlebag purse, the fastidiously coiffed shop assistant barely turned a hair as she eyed the dripping selection of technicolour accessories I’d just added to her display. She sat Mum and me down, both of us retching and watery eyed, and called for a janitor over the PA in a calm, euphonious drawl. Later an unfussed, sympathetic in-house nurse soothed me with lemonade in a sippy cup as I lay for a half hour in a tight white bed in the company sickbay. Americans were so nice, I decided. Perhaps even nicer than my own family. When it came time to leave, I clung to the doorman’s legs all the way to the taxi stand.

I’d almost forgotten this ignominious public upchuck until last Saturday here in CharmingVille. At precisely 1.45pm, me and my newly arrived niece were in a southbound tuk tuk on Riverside, tummies full of Metro fries, winging our way towards an afternoon of Snapchat by the pool.

As we sped through K-West corner, a midlife barang stepped into traffic and without warning mustered a passable Linda Blair right there in broad daylight. He missed us, only just, but dusted the toesocks of his surprised Khmer bride with what appeared to be 27 Screwdrivers and half a chicken schnitter.

“OH-EM-EFF-GEE. Like did that just literally like just happen?” squealed young Renesmee-Katniss-JonquilI-Pear by my side. “I can’t even. Hashtag DOUBLE YOU-TEE-EFF. Hashtag Whaaat? Hashtag Blaaart!” Luckily for Old Mate, 15 minutes of fame is now down to 10 seconds unless you take a screenshot. The traffic had slowed just long enough for my young charge to snap a selfie with spewling drunkard as photobomb, which she immediately sent to the internet. In less time than it takes to shotgun a 12oz Jack ‘n’ Coke, hundreds of spotty bonglords across Australia’s suburban badlands cacked themselves watching a feckless sexpat stagger through a day in his own personal struggletown.

Despite her confident use of social media, my sister’s youngest is also a little wobbly on her feet right now. Thanks to her naturally trusting nature, youthful sense of adventure and some catastrophically mean girls, she’s momentarily dropped out of a parochial lucerne-league Snob College in a well-known farming district in southern Australia. In a narrative arc worthy of a postmodern GOT subplot, she took a part-time job packing groceries into Range Rovers, as it happens mostly belonging to the mums of the malicious little crackers who were giving her grief.

This was not ideal, so for the next few weeks she’s calling CharmingVille home, taking a breather and, to my surprise since I’m not a fan of Devil’s Spawn per se, refreshing my air supply too. Over brunchtime bellinis we’ve talked boys, boobs, booze, books, bleach and buds of both varieties among a million other cool auntie/cooler kmoy subjects. We both agree Tony Abbott is an utter knob. We disagree on acrylic nails. I’m not keen on short shorts or hair extensions, but I’ll defend her right to wear them, especially in the face of Bindi Irwin and the other smug bodyshamers who’ve conspired to make this sensational young woman’s life a misery.

Leaving Marital HQ prior to our ooky puke encounter, my neighbours mistook us for mother and daughter. I was stoked. I find myself enthralled by her Saturday-night war stories and slip into ‘aiights’ with ease. She even calls me by name, the ‘auntie’ prefix dropped. Things were never like this when I was a niece, let alone a 10-year-old kid stood in a puddle of my own creation. It’s sick. But in a good way.

Later, as we sallied past that heaving old feller, I thought to myself: ‘There but for the grace of…’ etc, etc. “Hashtag YOLO motherfucker!” was what I actually said, though.