The dog's tally

Modern living throws up many difficulties, for which there should be free technical college courses.

- Jane Clifton

These include silencing the infuriating alarms on home appliances, communicating with the bossy cybernetics of a new car and cancelling unwanted internet subscription auto-payments, which make cockroaches and convolvulus seem existentially apathetic.

But nothing can prepare the New Zealander returning from overseas with a dog for the odyssey in store.

Protecting this country's biosecurity could hardly be more important, and it's phenomenal that we've banished hideous afflictions like rabies and hydatids. No one could doubt each of the requirements is absolutely necessary.

However, let's just say that when Homer dreamed up his slew of challenges for Odysseus’s return to Ithaca - Poseidon-wrought storms, abduction by nymphs, a brace of sea monsters, giant cannibals and memory-erasing fruit - he missed a few tricks.