There is high excitement here at Lush Places, at least on my part: The Stud Bull Catalogue has arrived. Because I have sheep, and no cows, and no intention of ever having cows, I have no use, obviously, for a stud bull. Or any sort of bull. I am terrified of bulls, while at the same time having an inexplicable sort of obsession with them.
Perhaps it is because they are so incongruously enormous. Seeing one is like encountering a bison in the backyard. There are often bulls in a neighbour’s paddock, which happily shares an electric-fenced border with our pear orchard paddock. I like to go and look at them. They look back, intently, but not in what I perceive to be a benign way. They are too big ever to be described as benign. They bellow at this time of year. The rams, in with the ewes, shout. Just now, Lush Places is less bucolic haven and more of a very noisy bonkathon.
The Stud Bull Catalogue is, oddly, a thing of beauty. It is full of portraits, some almost arty, of cattle beasts posing. They look like super-hefty supermodels. The catalogue is the equivalent of a model’s look book; it just happens to feature bulls with big bits that are not boobs. There is bull-boasting. A favourite: “Breeding deep guts and big butts since 1958.”
The catalogue is also a bit bonkers. It features an annual April Fools’ Day Wall of Fame. One of this year’s fake news stories announced a new competition: Old Farmer of the Year. Contestants had to be over the age of 85 and would battle it out in only one day “with an afternoon nap after lunch”.
The bull painting I most covet is Bulls Fighting (1768) by the English painter George Stubbs. He was most lauded for his portraits of horses. The New Yorker noted that, in a 2007 exhibition of his work at the Frick Collection, “you can almost inhale the aroma of damp straw and steaming dung”. We have the next best thing: two magnificent and magical portraits of bulls by local artist Gavin Chilcott.
The bloody dishwasher has broken down. It often does. This is the fourth time the bloody thing has broken down in the past two years. And, yes, I am acutely aware that this is of inconsequential importance, let alone interest, but I am somehow enjoying, for nostalgic reasons, hand-washing the dishes.
Greg, of course, says I am useless at hand-washing the dishes. He often rewashes the dishes that I have just washed. My grandfather Les used to do this. He, like Greg, was a perfectionist. Despite this early example of mansplaining, long before the term was coined, I liked washing the dishes with my grandfather. Sort of.
After he retired, he took up Chinese cookery. This involved dozens of tiny bowls of ingredients, which took hours to wash, then rewash. But we had fun bickering and talking over the soap suds.
He was very clever and wickedly-witted, and a stint at the sink could be an education in PG Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh, or a skewering of politicians. He was funny, savagely so, an expert in the almost lost art of eviscerating sarcasm.
His second wife, my wonderful step-grandmother, Rona, was an early committed environmentalist. She banned detergents from their home. The dishes had to be done using one of those soap-shaker things, which are no doubt environmentally friendly, but they’re absolutely useless for cleaning a roasting pan.
When Rona went away, my grandfather would nip up to the Ponsonby Four Square and buy the smallest available bottle of Palmolive dishwashing liquid. We never told her. Blood is thicker than dishwashing liquid. And there is nostalgia in a bottle of Palmolive. This is a sentiment that my resolutely unsentimental grandfather would no doubt have denounced as utter bull. Too bad. To the living belongs the last word.
