| The Good Life
The ram’s attractive front end is the apple of a shepherdess’s eye.
There are plenty of posh piles in the Wairarapa, and the poshest have names. Our pile is not a bit posh: it is a 60s stucco house. When I dreamt of our country life, I envisioned an elegant old villa with sweeping covered verandas and an Aga in the farmhouse kitchen in front of which would sleep a little black lamb, for decorative purposes. I did ask Miles, the sheep farmer, if I could bring one of his lambs inside, to sleep in front of the fire. Yes, he said. As long as I took the ewe in too.
I pictured myself wafting about in a pretty pinny, knocking up scones and plucking sweet peas and peonies and placing them in my handmade wooden trug.
I cannot make a scone that would not pass for a rock cake at the local church fete. I will have peonies and sweet peas, but I am more likely to stick them in a plastic trug. I do have a pretty pinny, but only because that stylish Irish lass, McLilty, gave me one as a gift when she came for a cup of tea (no rock scones were on offer, but I did make a cake). I wear this pinny, with sunglasses, in my 80s kitchen with the laminate cupboards. Wearing sunglasses in the kitchen is very Auckland but also practical – I don’t have to see the laminate cupboards.
We bought a garden, really, or hundreds of mature trees that meant we had a 30-year head start on a garden. Also, we had fled not just Auckland life, but an elegant old bungalow that required lashings of money on maintenance.
I have had to give up on my dream of a petting zoo. I pretended that this was a joke idea, but I secretly felt it had legs, if very muddy ones.
When visitors from the city come, I like to give them what I believe is a country treat by letting them feed apples to the rams. I have developed a special bond with one ram in particular. I call him Roger, after a much-loved and eccentric uncle. After his apple, he stays for a good pat. He wags his tail (not, at this time of the year, his most attractive feature, covered as it is in mud and … other substances), makes little grunting noises and goes to sleep against the fence post. He is like a giant, smelly cat. I adore him, but I concede he has a daggy behind that few could love.
As an aside, Masterton is a finalist in the Most Beautiful City awards. This has resulted in much scoffing. “Have all the other cities in NZ been blown up …?” asked some sceptic on the local paper’s Facebook page. Pah. We are going to win and I have come up with the slogan: “Masterton: More Beautiful Than A Ram’s Bum.”
And so back to Roger. He is fearfully jealous. When other rams want a scratch, he headbutts them.
He headbutted Nipper (so named because he is tiny and bites) the other evening and knocked my glass of posh Wairarapa rosé off the fence post. Nipper licked the spillage up. I have not told Miles.
The city visitors pretend to be excited about feeding the rams. They squelch out to the paddocks, snap a few pics in the hope that they will be instagrammable (alas, daggy sheep bums are not) then drift back inside in search of what is left of that bottle of local plonk. Weirdly, I seem to be the only person who likes the idea of petting big old sheep.
My new plan is to become a shepherdess. A ram got out of his paddock the other night and into another paddock. I thought I’d herd him back with the aid of a stick and some silver beet. The other rams were much taken with this spectacle and rushed to the gate to watch. I had to open this gate to herd the errant ram back to his home paddock and when I opened it, another ram rushed through.
I had to phone Miles to own up. I said I needed some training in shepherding.
He said: “It’s a matter of woolly thinking.”
I have come up with the slogan: “Masterton: More Beautiful Than A Ram’s Bum.”