Rachel Wise: There's no place like home - really there isn't

Rachel Wise.

Spending a few weeks in hospital recently has made me appreciate many things: Surgeons, doctors and nurses are right up there on the list, but further down are special little things hospital life offers - such as using my laptop without a cat walking across the keyboard and not finding a chihuahua hair in my coffee.

There is a lot to be said for home comforts, though (not including the hair in the coffee).

Peace and quiet, for example. Hospital wards can be noisy and I was looking forward to some quiet. That has yet to eventuate due to Bunnie, my elderly chihuahua, following me about barking to be picked up. I'm not yet up to hefting chubby chihuahuas about but she's too deaf to hear my explanation, so the barking continues …

It's also nice to have the cats and dogs about - a bit of company, okay a lot of company.

Waking up to find a large tabby cat asleep on your chest is always interesting. When you have several broken ribs it is more interesting than usual. Heaving it off is problematical but lying waiting to be rescued does seem a bit on the wimpy side.

So I promised myself extra painkillers and poked it repeatedly in the hope it would walk off in the direction of my "good" side. Nope.

The smallest cat has discovered gravity and is replicating Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiments. Having failed to find a tower in my house, she's dropping objects of different weights off the kitchen bench and the table to see which falls the fastest.

So far it seems most things fall at the same speed, it's just my reaction that differs. Pot plants draw a much louder reaction than pens and teaspoons.

Mobile phones and crockery cause shouting as well but kids' toys not so much. Until my wheelchair comes up against a Hot Wheels car upside down on the kitchen floor. This tends to bring whichever wheel made contact to a sudden halt while the opposite wheel keeps going.

More shouting - but unrelated to the gravity experiment.

Having a view outside the window is another benefit of being at home, after looking at the hospital carpark for a few weeks.

If I look out the dining room window I can see George the ram looking lustfully at his current love interest.

And out the lounge window I can see his love interest looking balefully back at him, safe in her own private paddock with her goat hut.

Because George, having been borrowed some months ago to bestow the joys of motherhood upon my two ewes, took an immediate shine to my nanny goat.

The nanny goat saw nothing shiny about George and that's not surprising, because George is ugly. And not just ordinary ugly . . . George is butt ugly.

Where most sheep sport a white fleece, or black or shades of brown, George is mostly a dirty grey. His legs redeem themselves by being black but they are too short for the rest of him - and the front ones are even shorter than the back ones.

Up close, things only get worse for poor George. His Roman nose is flanked by two little piggy eyes and his lower jaw is so undershot you have to look twice to see if he even has one.

Even the ewes were taken aback.

But George only had eyes for the goat. He followed her about, leering, wagging his tongue at her in what he obviously thought was an enticing manner. It wasn't.

The goat tried everything. She bunted him with her head – he thought it was lovely. She ran into her goat house to hide . . . he took to lurking in there and ambushing her. She ran . . . he ran (slower – because of the leg thing).

One morning shortly after George's arrival I couldn't find the nanny goat.

I looked around the paddock and she was nowhere to be seen. Looked in her goat house only to be confronted with a lurking George – ick.

I looked behind things and under things and finally hiked off to look down the river in case she'd left home in desperation. Next to the back gate there's a big, old blackberry bush and this particular morning it made a noise. So I bent down and looked and in the middle of the bush was my goat. Stuck.

She'd gone into the thicket out of sheer desperation and couldn't get out.

It took loppers, hedge clippers, gloves and loss of skin (not hers) to get her out and that's why she's in the front paddock now, looking over at her thwarted lover, who has to resort to the company of ewes. And he's looking back with what I think is meant to be adoration.

It's not pretty.

But it's better than the hospital carpark.