Last week, Pete my Fox Terrier, refused to accompany me on a walk. I knew then, that something was very wrong. Usually, he greets the merest hint of a walk - the chink of car keys or the lacing up of walking shoes - with tail-wagging ecstasy. On this occasion though, he hobbled to the letterbox with me but would go no further. I picked him up and took him back to the house where he lay listlessly in his basket. 
Even the sound of knife on chopping block which normally rouses him from the deepest slumber had no effect. Later in the day, I found him standing stock-still in the kitchen, staring at a patch of floor as if in a fugue. When he needed to go outside he whimpered to be let out, no longer willing to execute the balletic manoeuvre required to slot himself through the pet door. I let him into the garden. When he had relieved himself he went back to his basket and curled in on himself again. 
Not even the sun sprawling invitingly at the kitchen door didn’t lure him from bed.

Last week I drove with a companion to Christchurch. We started out early. The hum of bitumen under the car’s tyres was soothing and the landscape beyond the window seemed peacefully, quintessentially New Zealand. The broom on the hills glowed a florescent yellow in the morning sun. We travelled beside invisible but well-sign-posted waterways - Rough Creek, Sunday Creek, Coal Creek, Crooked Creek. 

We passed a man on a tractor in a field, a woman standing at a letterbox. We drove by dilapidated farm sheds clinging miraculously to verticality and new low-slung modernist milking sheds. A paddock full of Friesian calves looked like baize scattered with black and white jigsaw puzzle pieces. 

We were almost the only car on the road. The other vehicles were freight trucks, milk tankers, and camper vans with cheerful names like Fairwinds, Trailbrite and Easy Go. In Murchison, the soldier statue on the war memorial stood on his plinth in lemon-squeezer hat and puttees, head bowed and hands folded over his rifle butt. 

Everywhere, on seemingly blameless stretches of road there were white crosses adorned with plastic flowers. Near Christchurch, the sky darkened and it began to rain.