Clouds in my coffee

There is a ballet happening RIGHT NOW over our heads

How? How? HOW does our fat dog lose a kilo in two weeks?

It was very unlike Wellington last evening - balmy and windless, even at five o’clock. The air was still warm at fifteen degrees (somebody call a newsdesk!) and I noticed butterflies in the garden for the first time in months. A bumblebee earlier bumped its way inside; I had to rescue it with an inverted glass and a utility bill. Spring was saturating the valley, and I needed to mark the moment. After all, it was too early to make dinner, and the kids were occupied. It was time to unfurl.

No time for that nonsense, in the suburbs. The dog wanted a walk. I knew this because he climbed into my lap and used my abdomen as a stepladder to get to my face.

He pressed the breath out of me, I’m sorry to tell you. It reminded me our vet clinic had sent me this text earlier in the week: Otto is due a revisit to check his weight.

Nobody exactly likes getting a message like this, even if it is softened by a smiling face emoji. It provokes regret. It makes you review all the ill-advised items you ate this week: in my case, six scoops of French vanilla drizzled in butterscotch sauce with a generous dumping of chopped nuts (three servings over three days - not all at once, Your Honour). In Otto’s case, I may have given him a salted crisp or two, and the remnants of a beef tortilla. At the time I justified it, thinking, he’s doing so well on his diet. He deserves a little pleasure in his unremarkable life. And who is going to know?

Oh, did you forget? He has a FILE.

A weigh-in, then, it had to be. The clinic was still open. I suggested to my husband that he come with us, combining a walk with a quick nip into the bottle store for something white and cold, to toast the evening. We could stop at the vet on the way, because weighing a dog is a two-man job. And the walk itself would be gorgeous, kicking through the litter of cherry petals, nodding to other dog walkers (David and Ted) and feeling that lovely lick of heat across your back from a low sun.

I need to tell you our seven-days-a-week vet clinic is the most welcoming place, with the friendliest nurses and most attentive vets. The staff encourage you to drop by with your dog without a reason, except to receive a loving welcome and a small chew. This is to familiarize your pet with the clinic and reduce their anxiety in the event of a real visit.

How nice is that? How much do you want to be friends with these people? I’d like to go there for a loving welcome and a chew, and not take the dog.

The only thing I could possibly take issue with is the poster hanging in their exam room, featuring a hand-drawn Labrador in various stages, progressing from left to right. The dog goes from Underweight, to Healthy Weight, to Overweight, to Obese, and finally becomes A Danger to Shipping.

I find this poster shaming because our dog could easily appear on the right. Most of the time he gets away with his barrel tummy because of all his curly wool. But now and then, if you see him from behind at a certain angle, it looks like he’s been inflated by a foot-pump. You could tie a basket underneath him, light a flame and watch him slowly ascend. You could charge passengers for scenic flights above Karori.

Anyway, we arrived and wrestled him onto the weigh station. He was deliriously excited to see the nurse, so it took a while to stop him scrambling with happiness and sit long enough on the plate to register a result. And when it came, I was mightily surprised. TEN POINT NINE?

For one thing, losing 500g a week is ill-advised. He was only meant to plateau at 12kg. Plus, it didn’t seem possible. I’d seen what that dog had eaten in the last two weeks: reduced dog biscuits and reduced wet food, certainly, but also various unspeakables dragged from the bathroom bin. Half of him was bone, organ, fat and muscle, and the other half was wadded cotton. Mostly makeup remover pads.

I texted my dog-owning friends, and Ness told me that a dog’s weight can vary depending on the moment of his digestion cycle. He might be carrying a recent meal, which adds false grams. Conversely, he might have just dropped his guts. It’s a difficult science, dog weight management, and wins are not always what they seem.

By the time we got home, let’s just say he lost another seventy-five grams. We’re clean out of poop bags, but I must say we chose a lovely pinot gris.

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I don’t think I have any hobbies. Isn’t that terrible? A hobby, I guess, being something you enjoy just for the pleasure of it, because it scratches a deep itch within your personality. Fancying pigeons, showing dogs, embroidering hoops, pressing flowers, collecting coins and buttons, solving jigsaws. I can’t point to anything I do that’s truly pointless. Even my reading aims to improve my mind. All my listening is for information. I aggregate facts. That’s no hobby.

A true hobby, I like to think, is a dorky one. Anyone can say they like European films, off-road mountain biking or Russian novels. That doesn’t cost them anything. It simply adds to their texture and cool, making them more attractive. Let’s call them brand extensions, not pastimes.

Imagine telling your office mates or a dinner party that you’re into watching planes. That you park beside the runway every chance you get to take notes, talk to other beaky people about what just landed or took off, and track international flight paths on a radar app. You don’t actually fly planes or fly in them. That’s what I call a glorious hobby. It costs you your reputation.

At the cost of my reputation (let’s face it, this entire Substack is a cost of my reputation), let me tell you something new about me. I’m now a cloudspotter.

YES!

I WATCH CLOUDS!

Can you imagine a better hobby for anyone both lazy (me) and commitment phobic (also me)? I don’t have the available patience to invest time in a skill-based activity, like learning trumpet (I tried that and lasted six lessons. Do you know how hard it is to blow a good C?). I don’t want to join anything where I’m expected to show up once a week. I don’t want to be in a WhatsApp group. I don’t want to have to change clothes, buy gear, or even leave the house.

And time spent isn’t really important to cloud-spotters. You can do it for sixty seconds, five minutes, or half an hour. I bet there are some sturdy souls who can do it for half a day. When I become a senior citizen, I intend to do it for weeks at a time. You can write down in a journal or sketch what you see, or tell nobody - it’s a matter between you and the atmosphere. It’s a genius activity. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it sooner.

Photo by Arteum.ro on Unsplash

It all started when my local bookshop posted the arrival of this new hardback:

Photo by https://www.facebook/marsdenbooks

It’s a lovely object, sized for a coffee table, with hand-drawn pictures of clouds and atmospheric conditions, accompanied by short bursts of text. The writing is science-based but also rather lyrical. It’s appealing and deceptively simple. It’s expensive and not to be bought impulsively. And yet it contains multitudes.

Basically it’s a page per cloud, starting with the obvious ones (cumulus - your daily mashed potato) and ending with those you may never be lucky enough to see (a halo phenomena; a circumzenithal arc). It explains why clouds behave as they do, what they are made of (dust, ice crystals, droplets, wind, light), and how their relationship with land and air pressure directs the weather, but not how they influence your subconscious, and why some people can be deeply engaged with them all their lives (John Constable, for example) while others will always ignore them. There’s explanation, here, while leaving plenty of room for mystery.

I bought the book, and it made me look up. I couldn’t believe the difference, now I had the tools and understood the categories. If you name something in nature, you notice it. And by noticing, you feel an emotion toward it. You’re now aware of each other; you have new responsibilities to the other. This is why naturalists were obsessed by specificity and giving every living thing a name particular to its nature. This is an act of love, not merely science. It makes sense now. At 52, I get it.

I look up whenever I think to, and a clear blue sky is now a disappointment to me. Stupidly, I even look up when I’m at the wheel of my car waiting at the lights. If ever I have a nose-to-tail accident, I’ll be the only person ever to tell a cop, “I’m sorry, but I just had to watch that massive undulatus. Do you know how rare that is?”

I’m terrible at this. For one thing, the clouds don’t stop moving for me. In the time it takes me to recognize one (and I can only name puffy cumulus and streaky cirrus with any confidence), it may have evaporated or been enveloped by something else. Nobody can vouch that it was ever there. Only me. This is intimacy of the truest kind - the universe handing you a tiny gossamer gift that dissolves on arrival.

Clouds mostly aren’t dramatic, even in a postcode as windblown as mine. This makes it tricky to spot them, too. Anyone can see a blackening cumulonimbus bearing down on them, but only a connoisseur, a true fancier of clouds would notice a delicate pileus, or little beret of a cloud, sitting on the top of a coming storm. It appears for only minutes, and then is gone.

I’ve tried sharing my finds with my family, but they don’t see the magic in it, only the pointlessness (see? This is a REAL ASS HOBBY). “I think that’s a cirrocumulus?” I’ll say to the kids, if we’re parked at Oriental Parade on a Friday night slurping drive-thru Cokes, and they’re watching the swimmers or joggers and I’m watching the sky. “Or maybe radiatus?” I’ll check my Cloudspotting app at this point, because only a lunatic would take a coffee table book to McDonalds.

So, I’m still a novice, but I do have a favourite cloud type. Trust me, I wouldn’t hurry a Lenticular out of bed in the morning, especially if it was Stacked.

My kids are too young to spot clouds like I do, because cloudspotting is for Stoics. A Stoic understands that beauty lies in acknowledging pain is baked into life. The pain of cloudspotting is that the cloud doesn’t wait for you. It will emerge from thin beginnings, delight in weightlessness, gather strength, radiate beauty, collapse and disintegrate and its entire existence, brief or long, may even go unnoticed. Accepting this about a cloud, and accepting you may be its only witness, and that you too will one day vanish, your beauty perhaps unnoticed, is essential to the cloudspotter. Kids have years to learn this profound lesson, and it doesn’t have to be now.

Forget Otto. Check out that altocumulus! (Photo by Maggie Tait)

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My darlings, please feel free to share with me your dorkiest hobbies. I will love you even more when I know that they are, trust me.

One last thing. At the risk of overloading you with links and reading, I so recommend this lovely piece by Greytown’s

Dan Keane

, who rode the Wairarapa line into Wellington this week. If I could write this effortlessly and with such gleaming effect about nature, I’d do nothing else. I think I’m drawn to Dan’s writing because like me he is expatriate, and has the double perspective of living a New Zealand life while at the same time observing its strangeness and differences. This is a gift to the rest of us but must also be exhausting.

Dan wrote a memorable piece about joining a community event in a country hall and how effortlessly his children took part and blended in, perhaps compared to him, as he was so occupied noticing the New Zealandness. There’s joy and a sadness in such moments, for people who emigrate. We want to belong, so much. But if we truly embrace our new home unselfconsciously, we must leave an essential part of us behind. The part that remembers somewhere else. We try to consign it to the past, but it is indissoluble. There is exquisite tension here.

I guess writers also regularly experience this push and pull - trying to be part of the flow of life, while being endlessly tugged out of the moment so they can capture it on paper, or in music. We owe artists a debt for this because they often do it at their own expense.

I mean this generally, not specifically in Dan’s case! He writes closely and seriously in his essays, but there is also plenty of lightness and grace. I learn things about America and NZ in his pieces. How lucky can you be, as a reader?