Marmite
ercolour cobra... a wat Marmite vs ris Ch ife w s n’ by Stephe
Poppy
Home from home… from Borneo to North Wales When Stephen Gregory and his wife Chris moved back to Caernarfon from exotic Borneo, they didn’t travel alone…
Either by choice or out of sheer necessity, people are very
sure enough, a day or two later he was enjoying our chicken
mobile these days. I suppose they always have been… for
and rice and moving into the house and sharing our air-
thousands of years, ever since he stood up on his hind legs
conditioned bedroom.
and peered at the horizon, Man has set off on his journeys across deserts and mountains, crossing rivers and seas, in
Marmite came to us a few years later, in a torrential
search of land and food and security.
thunderstorm. Our son, hearing a whimpering commotion from beneath a parked car, and seeing how the rain was
Today, maybe more than ever before, in these troubled times…
overflowing from the drains in a churning river of foam,
Some people say that the world has become our global village,
peered and looked and saw a puppy sheltering there. He
where we live and breathe and survive as best we can,
brought the puppy home and called him Marmite, a brown and
travelling and settling as needs must.
black bundle of soggy fur, like a shivering wolf cub.
Poppy and Marmite came to Wales in the cargo hold of a huge
And from their walks along Crocodile Beach, they travelled
thundering aeroplane. One afternoon they were running and
more than seven thousand miles to North Wales, and the
sniffing and digging up the sand of a place called Crocodile
crunching shingle of Dinas Dinlle.
Beach, on the north coast of Borneo – and a few days later they were exploring the cold salty shingle of Dinas Dinlle, in
Crocodile Beach was aptly named, not just nicknamed to
lovely North Wales.
sound exotic. There were crocodiles in the muddy tangles of mangrove and in the eucalyptus forests, and sometimes
Poppy and Marmite, two dogs we bought back with us, all the
they lay among the great heaps of driftwood on the shore.
way from faraway and little known Brunei Darussalam…
They emerged from the creeks and rivers which ran out of the jungle, and they slithered into the sea, to move stealthily
Poppy was a beautiful stray, only a puppy, coloured and built a
and dangerously along the coast to the next outpouring of
bit like a foxhound, white and black and a lovely russet. When
fresh water and then slip back upstream. Their likeliest prey
we first met him we were living in a spacious stilted house
was dogs, for there were plenty of strays along the beach.
with a pretty garden, only a few yards from the seashore.
Poppy and Marmite, with their smart yellow collars and long
Poppy came to stand at our gate and stare at us and cock his
retractable leads, looked at these skinny specimens with an
head on one side and wag his tail – because he knew he was
unmistakable air of smugness… for they, Poppy and Marmite,
borderline irresistible and we were hopelessly dog-friendly
had won the affection of a couple of ex-pats. Every evening
ex-pats. He’d learned already, in the first few months of
they ate chicken and rice, and they had learned the delicious
his life, that some of the people living in the leafy suburbs
delight of air-con.
of Kuala Belait were not at all fond of dogs… some of them disliked and distrusted dogs for long established cultural
And so to North Wales. After 18 exhausting and turbulent
reasons, and others were not completely averse to including
hours in the belly of an aeroplane, with all its horrible stink
them on their menu.
of fuel and its terrible roaring, they landed in London. How sweet it was, a few more hours later, to be outside again, in
So Poppy came to our gate and cocked his head at us and,
the cool fresh air of Dinas Dinlle! The cleanest air in the whole
NWM 2022 Page 21
