Four legged friends

Marmite

Poppy Marmite vs cobra... a watercolour by Stephen’s wife Chris

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 mobile these days. I suppose they always have been… for thousands of years, ever since he stood up on his hind legs and peered at the horizon, Man has set off on his journeys across deserts and mountains, crossing rivers and seas, in search of land and food and security.

Today, maybe more than ever before, in these troubled times… Some people say that the world has become our global village, where we live and breathe and survive as best we can, travelling and settling as needs must.

Poppy and Marmite came to Wales in the cargo hold of a huge thundering aeroplane. One afternoon they were running and sniffing and digging up the sand of a place called Crocodile

Beach, on the north coast of Borneo – and a few days later they were exploring the cold salty shingle of Dinas Dinlle, in lovely North Wales.

Poppy and Marmite, two dogs we bought back with us, all the way from faraway and little known Brunei Darussalam…

Poppy was a beautiful stray, only a puppy, coloured and built a bit like a foxhound, white and black and a lovely russet. When we first met him we were living in a spacious stilted house

with a pretty garden, only a few yards from the seashore. Poppy came to stand at our gate and stare at us and cock his head on one side and wag his tail – because he knew he was borderline irresistible and we were hopelessly dog-friendly ex-pats. He’d learned already, in the first few months of

his life, that some of the people living in the leafy suburbs of Kuala Belait were not at all fond of dogs… some of them disliked and distrusted dogs for long established cultural reasons, and others were not completely averse to including them on their menu.

So Poppy came to our gate and cocked his head at us and, sure enough, a day or two later he was enjoying our chicken and rice and moving into the house and sharing our airconditioned bedroom.

Marmite came to us a few years later, in a torrential thunderstorm. Our son, hearing a whimpering commotion from beneath a parked car, and seeing how the rain was overflowing from the drains in a churning river of foam,

peered and looked and saw a puppy sheltering there. He brought the puppy home and called him Marmite, a brown and black bundle of soggy fur, like a shivering wolf cub.

And from their walks along Crocodile Beach, they travelled more than seven thousand miles to North Wales, and the crunching shingle of Dinas Dinlle.

Crocodile Beach was aptly named, not just nicknamed to sound exotic. There were crocodiles in the muddy tangles of mangrove and in the eucalyptus forests, and sometimes they lay among the great heaps of driftwood on the shore. They emerged from the creeks and rivers which ran out of the jungle, and they slithered into the sea, to move stealthily and dangerously along the coast to the next outpouring of fresh water and then slip back upstream. Their likeliest prey was dogs, for there were plenty of strays along the beach. Poppy and Marmite, with their smart yellow collars and long retractable leads, looked at these skinny specimens with an unmistakable air of smugness… for they, Poppy and Marmite, had won the affection of a couple of ex-pats. Every evening they ate chicken and rice, and they had learned the delicious delight of air-con.

And so to North Wales. After 18 exhausting and turbulent hours in the belly of an aeroplane, with all its horrible stink of fuel and its terrible roaring, they landed in London. How sweet it was, a few more hours later, to be outside again, in the cool fresh air of Dinas Dinlle! The cleanest air in the whole