The Good Life
Weak thighs and scary YouTube videos lead to demotion from Chief Drencher to deckchair filler.
Greg Dixon
I’ve thought about it, and I don’t want you to do it,” Michele said. I knew what that meant, but I wanted her to say it out loud, so I asked, “What don’t you want me to do?” She put down the garden hose and turned to look at me. “I don’t,” she said firmly, “want you to drench our lambs.” So ended Act II, Scene Two from my crisis of masculinity.
Scene One had played out the day before when Miles the sheep farmer appeared out of the afternoon heat haze just as I was about to mow the long driveway verges and weed-eat around the letterbox.
I was dressed in my dark-blue boiler suit, made of thick, heavy cotton, and my black gumboots. He, more sensibly, was in shorts, a light, collared shirt, his trademark bucket hat and dark glasses. “Rather hot to be doing that,” he said, sensibly, gesturing at the ride-on. “It’s not that hot,” I lied.
Miles had just brought the ewe and ram lambs back from his place after drenching them, but he had a question for me. Would I be able to drench our three lambs that had been left behind at our place?
“Of course!” I said with loud, confident enthusiasm, while quietly panicking. “However, I don’t know how.” It was quite simple, he went on: get the lamb between your legs, open their mouth with a finger, put the drenching gun’s delivery tube over the tongue and squirt. But you have to be careful: don’t push the metal tube too hard into their mouths, or too far, because it can hurt them.
“Could I practise on you, then?” I asked. He gave me a look and left the drench in the shed.
My promotion to Chief Drencher was not greeted with loud, confident enthusiasm by Michele. So, that made two of us. We decided, in lieu of experience, to search for a YouTube demonstration of how to drench a sheep, and found one by a British vet called Chris Lewis. “It’s important we don’t jam the gun in,” he counselled at one point. “If you jam the gun in, you are liable to put it through the back of the throat and your ewe will die in three or four days with infection.” An hour later, after she’d thought about this, Michele informed me she didn’t want me drenching the lambs.
When Miles popped over with his tractor two days later to mow a couple of our paddocks, Michele wandered out to tell him that she had demoted me from Chief Drencher.
“We googled how to do it,” she told him.
“That was your first mistake,” he said.
“Well, I won’t let him do it,” she continued.
“Drat,” he concluded, before offering, if we put our lambs in the tractor bay, to show us how to do it when he’d finished the mowing.
Thirty minutes later, we watched Miles drench Polly Poo Plate (socalled after she’d achieved the breathtaking double act of pooing in Xanthe’s plate while simultaneously wolfing the contents of Elizabeth Jane’s bowl). But when it was time for my attempt at drenching Xanthe, she kept wriggling out from between my legs.
“I don’t think my thighs are strong enough,” I observed.
“I’m not going there,” said the sheep farmer, ending Act II, Scene Three from my crisis of masculinity.
Leaves are already falling here. It isn’t because autumn’s come early, it’s because Lush Places has become Very Dry Places. A number of the many poplar trees that form shelter belts around our paddocks have succumbed to heat stress and had begun their journey to winter dormancy by January’s end. We’ve had no significant rain since early December. And, with the hot nor’wester, the mercury continuously in the high 20s and likely to hit 30 twice this week, our browning lawns and paddocks are fast disappearing under leaves.
Fortunately, the golden elms are still providing plenty of shade for sitting under in my deckchair. I shall be retiring there for the week, I think, weedy thighs crossed defensively, to once again contemplate what it means to be a city bloke gone country.
My promotion was not greeted with loud, confident enthusiasm by Michele. So, that made two of us.