The Good Life
As a student of the death of English, I have embraced many “learnings”.
Why did the chicken cross the road? After two months living with The Hens From Hell, I finally know the answer to this eternal question: the chicken crossed the road because it thought it had spotted something to eat.
Alternatively, perhaps it had found something to destroy or – this is the ideal road-crossing for a chicken – something to eat and something to destroy before nipping back across said road to eat or destroy something else.
This is what chickens do, because chickens are as all-seeing as they are evil. Chickens are chickens, but they possess an eagle’s eyes.
You might call these the latest lessons from our first year in the country, though as a student of the death of the English language, I know that lessons are no longer to be called lessons. They are now “learnings”. (This, too, is a “learning”, if that is in fact the correct singular of the plural, though it is most certainly a learning I’d rather not have learning-ed.)
Still, what an extraordinary year of what-we-used-to-call-lessons it has been. It was 12 months ago this week that we drove through pelting, freezing rain from Palmerston North – we’d stayed there the night after flying down from Auckland – to our new home to begin our new life.
The year since has been something like Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, minus the macabre endings where, say, a man unknowingly eats his dog for supper or a woman realises her husband is a giant bee. A couple of lifelong townies, we have had no choice but to scale – without crampons and ice axe but certainly with looks of grim, Hillary-like determination – the Lhotse Face of our ignorance.
The first of my many learnings was that if one is living on a 5ha lifestyle block as opposed to, say, a 5000ha high-country station, one can probably forgo spending hard-earned money on dinky black walkie-talkies. The first week of talking to each other over them – “Where are you? Over.” “Here. Over.” “Where? Over.” “Over here. Over” – is a bit of larky fun for your inner 10-year-old, but you’ll probably find that yelling the same questions is more efficient and less embarrassing.
Another learning is that Houdini was a bush-league escape artist. Sheep are in fact the world’s greatest. It doesn’t seem to matter how high the fence or how much electrical charge is flowing through the wire, you will inevitably find a Great Sheepdini grazing on your lawn when you least expect to. On the upside, your shepherding skills will improve rather swiftly.
The most deflating of my learnings is that our fat little cat, who appears to spend 23¾ hours of each day sleeping or eating, has contributed more to rabbit control on our small holding than I and my air rifle ever will. The score now stands at 9-0.
But it hasn’t been all hard lessons – sorry, learnings. Among the most life-affirming was discovering that when one is in the country and one feels the call of nature, nature is really quite happy for you to take care of business right there and then, because nobody else is around and nature is happy to look away. It is, I must tell you, very freeing indeed to have a pee in your own fields.
However, the most liberating of my learnings has been the realisation that Auckland is important only to Aucklanders. This may surprise its inwardlooking denizens and its parochial media, but it turns out the rest of the country doesn’t really care about the city and its wildly dull, hopelessly intractable troubles. Nor does the rest of country seem to care if that’s where you come from.
And after a year, neither will you. Auckland isn’t Hotel California. You can check out, and you can leave. Here endeth the learnings.
The year has been minus the macabre endings where, say, a man unknowingly eats his dog for supper.