The Good Life Michele Hewitson
After a loveless relationship with the city, our columnist gets a bit clucky.
The local paper is running an I Love Wairarapa photo competition. In a previous life, I would have turned up my city nose at the very idea. How corny. How can you love a region? It’s just where you happen to live.
In all of the years I lived in Auckland, from ages 12 to 52, never did I ever think, I love Auckland. It was just where I resided. It is not true that I didn’t have a lot of fun in Auckland. Mostly this fun took place in bars where punk bands played and, later, in seedy bars and fancy restaurants where journos gathered. That was my idea of community.
Young people today, eh?
They spend all their money on smashed avos on toast and that trendy drink that tastes, to my simple country palate, as I imagine fermented camel’s toes would taste. Tsk, tsk. No wonder they will never be able to afford a house. But when you live in grotty flats with grotty types or, increasingly, in your parents’ house, you have to go out, otherwise you will go mad.
I lived in Auckland, first in grotty flats, and then in my own houses and, if anyone had asked, I would have said, why would you live anywhere else? But I never said, “I love Auckland”.
I didn’t, and still don’t, know what Auckland is. It’s too tribal. It’s suburbs, not a whole place. I always referred to the North Shore as not actually being Auckland. It was some other place, utterly unknown. I wouldn’t have moved there for quids.
It helps if you move for love. I am writing this almost two years to the day from when we first came to see the place we would end up buying, in Masterton, in the wops, for God’s sake. We came for love. I had found an old friend again, the Artist, after not having been in touch for many years. I met his partner, the Gardener, and loved them both. They happened to live in Masterton.
Then, the day we came to see what would become our new home, we met Miles the sheep farmer, Carolyn the shepherdess, Red the red sheep dog and the most beautiful lambs. When I gave a speech at the Ranfurly Ladies Club luncheon, I said we had moved to the Wairarapa because I had fallen in love with Miles. His lovely wife, Janet, was at the lunch. She said it would be the talk of the town! A scandal! I don’t think she minded, really. Every small town needs a little scandal, now and then.
If I hadn’t moved to the Wairarapa, I would never have had a lamb sleeping on a cushion in my kitchen. When I was a city person, I never gave sheep any thought beyond complaining about the price of lamb at the supermarket. Sometimes, I idly think:
I wish I had been a sheep farmer instead of hanging about in bars and soulless offices.
Raising orphan lambs might make you tough enough to be a sheep farmer – or so you might think. It has the very opposite effect, as has hanging out with big sheep every day. We no longer eat lamb. I love sheep. I love their smell, especially in the rain, and their stubborn faces, and the way the friendly ones lean against your leg and demand to have their faces stroked. They have distinct personalities. Some are aloof and others, such as Fat Freddy, are sociable and naughty. Fat Freddy’s favourite trick is to pull my shorts down. He is quite the comedian.
We and the sheep, and the people who love sheep, are a little community within a wider community. It feels like home in a way Auckland never did.
Which is by way of saying, I love Wairarapa. (And I managed to write that without feeling the slightest bit corny about doing so.)
We came for love. I had found an old friend, the Artist, and his partner, the Gardener, and loved them both.