All downhill from here

As the wise man said, a bird on the stick’s worth a tramp in the bush. These days I keep hearing of falls. In youth falls are common but harmless. In age they are rarer but drastic. This week was the turn of a Christchurch entertainer who wishes to remain anonymous. She went down on a blackboy peach. ‘‘I just stepped out the back door to feed the chooks,’’ said Jani*e, ‘‘and my foot shot from under me.’’

Chooks are alarmists. Drop a plate and they’ll erupt in squawking flapping horror.

So when a whole entertainer fell to earth in front of them it was like World War III. But chook world wars are brief affairs. Within minutes they had accepted the prostrate entertainer as a new, if strange, addition to the flock.

‘‘It’s good for the modesty,’’ Jani*e told me on the phone, ‘‘to lie with chooks a while. It’s grounding.’’

Nevertheless the lust to rise again burned in Jani*e as it burned in Jesus. And despite bruising that now looks like a Jamaican sunset she hauled herself up from the vale of chooks and peaches and back into the world of bipedal verticality. And long may she remain there.

When I’m out on the hills with the dog I have taken to using a walking stick to forestall a fall. In fact it’s more a staff than a stick, being roughly the height of my chest. I lumber across the brown hills like a fat Judean shepherd.

Imade the thing myself – cutting a branch from a macrocarpa, whittling the twigs from it, peeling the bark, sanding the shaft, then finally anointing it with linseed oil, a sort of coup de grease. The result is a holy simplicity of form, function and fragrance.

Going uphill I plant the thing in the good earth and haul on it, supplementing the efforts of my ageing thighs. But as any mountaineer will tell you, it’s downhill that’s the test, it’s downhill that kills. And in going downhill the staff acts like the training wheels on a child’s bike. It corrects the wee tilts that could turn to catastrophe. It’s the third leg that we in our wisdom give to milking stools but that god didn’t think to give us.

On the flat I swing my staff like a Viking axe. I behead thistles, nettles and the burrs that seek to bury into the dog’s pelt. Or else I sniff the linseed oil and am borne away to the cricket fields of fantasy. What innings I play as I walk. The Port Hills ring with the Lord’s applause.

Yesterday the dog and I climbed through native bush to visit a dog’s grave. A fantail followed, as they often do. When I stopped at the grave to pant and remember, the bird flitted about my head. I held out my staff for it to perch on, and it did. It perched and it cocked its head and it fanned its tail and it looked at me and it chirruped. And fool that I am I felt like St Francis.

Now, it would be possible to say all sorts of things about that, pretty well all of which would disregard the truth that we seven billion apes threaten the existence of every species on the planet apart from the ones we like to make pets of and the others we like to eat. But I shall say only that all seduction is delusion and I was seduced. That’ll do me for today, I thought as I went back down the hill, taking care not to fall. That’ll do me very well.