The Good Life Michele Hewitson
The animals down our way make milk, mayhem and, occasionally, meat.
Carolyn, the shepherdess, said, “You should get a pig. Yum, yum.” Carolyn, as I may have mentioned previously, has been known to take sick lambs home and put them to bed. Her bed. She also has a taste – in addition to her fondness for roast pork – for the surreal. She once suggested we get a llama. Why? She thought it would be fun to put in with the sheep, merely because it would look quite mad.
A sheep fell over the other day when she was here and she picked it up and carted it to the car. She is just like Pinetree Meads! She scoffed at that. Those romneys that Pinetree was reputed to have carried, one under each arm, while training for the rugby are as light as feathers, she reckons. Our sheep are east friesians and they are big buggers.
Carolyn is a proper country person and I am not. Or not yet. A proper country person would get a pig and, some weeks later, eat it. I have toyed with the idea of doing a butchery class. In the country there are such things. But what, or who, would I butcher? Roger? Roger, my favourite ram, has gone. “To another place,” said Miles, whose sheep Roger actually was. I thought he meant he’s gone “over the rainbow bridge”, as the SPCA’s Bob Kerridge calls it, but – thank heavens – Miles meant Whanganui. I suppose it’s better than being sent to Auckland.
Still, I said, “I thought you were going to give me Roger for Christmas!” Miles, mildly, as is his wont, pointed out that what we were doing at that very moment was securing fences to stop the ram named Son of Roger from getting into our garden and eating the forest pansy tree and driving us round the twist.
He told me that Roger had been shorn by his new owner the other day and he lay there like a veritable lamb. Well, of course he did, I said, he’s depressed. He’s missing me and his head scratches. Would he get head scratches at his new home? He’s a prize breeding ram, Miles said. He’d be getting more than head scratches.
A big part of the reason we bought our country place was that the sheep here are for milking to make Miles’s award-winning artisan cheeses. It is a nice feeling to go to the posh supermarket and buy cheese from “our” sheep and feed it to visitors from the city. Never mind the fact that, beyond scratching sheep’s heads and feeding them apples, we have absolutely nothing to do with the making of the cheeses. And it is hypocrisy to say that we like the fact that the sheep are not meat sheep, because we do like a good
lamb chop.
Miles has warned me about naming animals. “It is very hard,” he said, giving me one of his inscrutable looks, “to send Michele off to the works.”
I have taken not the blindest notice of this warning. I named the neighbours’ cows Crazy and Daisy. They were really called Sally and Pansy and, one day, Greg drove up the drive to see them hanging upside down. The home-kill man had visited and Crazy and Daisy were no more.
We were invited to the neighbours’ for a post-wedding party, where there was a spit-roasted lamb, lashings of crayfish and some particularly delectable salami. I set about stuffing my face with the salami. Our host said: “Those are our cows.” I went a bit green. “I think,” said our host, holding up a slice before popping it into his mouth with relish, “that this is Crazy.”
I didn’t have any more salami. I am not a proper country person, yet. But I have, I hope, another 20 years or so to learn how to become one.
Miles warned me about naming animals. “It is very hard,” he said, “to send Michele off to the works.”