The Good Life
Don’t let it be said that entertainment options in the country are paltry.
Every second Saturday, Miles the sheep farmer drives to Wellington to take his wonderful ewes’ milk cheeses to the farmers’ market. He and his cheeses have quite the following at the market. The cheeses have a following because they are wonderful, and Miles has a following because he, too, is wonderful, and also because he is now Miles the sheep farmer from the Listener. He has never had any say in being Miles the sheep farmer from the Listener, but he doesn’t seem to mind too much, despite being the most modest of chaps.
It is lucky that he is such an amicable fellow because he has ended up with a pair of townies owning land he grazes the sheep on. We had a new fence and gate put in last week and a couple of sheep got stuck on the wrong side of the new gate. We decided to help Miles out by opening it and letting them back into the right paddock. This resulted in all of the sheep rushing into the wrong paddock. We decided we’d better own up, once we’d got the sheep back into the right paddock; we were rather proud of our achievement. A shame we also let a random ram back in with the ewes; Miles runs a very scientific breeding programme. He merely raised his eyebrows at the admission of our “help”.
On the Saturdays he doesn’t go to the Wellington market, he goes to the Masterton market. He may do this to get away from us and our helping. He comes home from the markets with some very good stories. Our favourite is the one about the Phantom Taster, a regular visitor to the Kingsmeade cheese stall. The phantom taster could be identified only by an arm, snaking through the throng, to help itself to the tasting offerings. After some years, Miles asked the phantom taster whether he would like to actually buy some cheese. “No, thank you,” replied the arm. He’d had sufficient. I’ll say! Miles reckons he’s put away about 10kg of free cheese in a decade of tasting.
After Miles got home from the Wellington market on Saturday, he phoned to say one of his cheese-buying customers had an idea for me: I might like to visit the Masterton Poultry and Pigeon show. I’ll say! We got up early on Sunday and drove to the home industries pavilion at the showgrounds where a certain person may have won six certificates in vege and flower growing earlier in the year.
The home industries pavilion, on fruit and vege day, is a picture of pastoral serenity compared to the poultry show. The racket! The smell!
There was a long, green iridescent drake such as you’d see in a Bill Hammond painting, beautiful and strange; like a long cool drink of water. There were madly annoying, enormous cockerels, out-shouting each other: “I’m louder than you – and more handsome!”
There were flights of breeders’ fancies as mad and as endearing as Chagall’s imaginings of chickens. There were punk chickens and new-wave chickens and one with a hairdo as ridiculous as any member of that 80s band Kajagoogoo.
“You look ridiculous, dude,” I said, and stuck my finger in its cage. There are no signs saying “Do Not Stick your Finger in the Cages”. They are not required; you’ll only do it once.
I should have known better. We have wyandotte chickens and one in particular, Little Linda, will take your finger off soon as look at it – particularly if there is a chunk of dog roll stuck on the end of it.
There were beautiful wyandottes at the show – bantam ones. The breeder said I should give him a call. I said we had four big wyandottes and that was quite enough chickens for us. He said, “Yeah, they eat a f---ing lot.”
There was a little ginger-haired boy, trotting along behind his parents, mouth agape. I said, “Do you like chickens?” He pulled a face and shook his head, emphatically. I could sympathise: the noise! The stench!
We came home and told Miles. He laughed. He may have also been secretly relieved that, for a couple of hours at least, we weren’t at home helping out with his sheep.
There were flights of breeders’ fancies as mad as Chagall’s chicken imaginings.