The first thing you learn when you move to the country from the city is to expect the unexpected. Your education in this typically begins in the first month or two when you gaze out the windows of your new country pile and find yourself looking at something unexpected like, say, half a dozen sheep nibbling at your lawn.
This, you need to keep in mind, will be only the first, and actually pretty gentle, entry in your new mental folder marked “Gadzooks!”
Sooner or later, you will inevitably draw your curtains early one morning for a much, much more intimidating Gadzooks! moment, like rubbing your eyes to make sure you really are seeing a herd of fully grown dairy cows nibbling on your hedges and thundering about your garden.
Between the sheep and the cows there will be far more expensive episodes, such as the evening your dunny cistern fails to refill itself and you discover the water pump has prematurely but permanently died, leading to an astoundingly enormous bill for an after-hours plumber to put in a new one.
At some point, your ongoing experience of expecting the unexpected will come to include some pretty weird, wild stuff – like finding a giant mother possum and her surprisingly large offspring sleeping under your (mysteriously) overturned birdbath.
There will be some instalments that will amuse, like when you pull the car over to talk to Miles the sheep farmer as he moves his flock up the road. When you open the car door, a sheep (Madam Xanthe, of course) will unexpectedly try to get in the vehicle with you.
Eventually, you will reach the very zenith of such experiences. This will involve finding two wild kittens curled up asleep underneath one of your chooks, a chook that has unexpectedly taken to hiding in a nest in the ivy while it pretends to lay eggs.
After a while, expecting the unexpected in the country becomes second nature to the recovering urbanite so that if, say, it were to suddenly rain sheep poo from the sky or the evil chooks were to run off and join the circus or the paddocks were to turn a horrible shade of purple overnight, you would simply shrug your shoulders and get back to the mowing or stacking the firewood.
So, given all this hard-earned experience of expecting the unexpected I now have, you might imagine I would have fully anticipated the unexpected thing that happened to me out of the wild blue yonder last Tuesday. But I didn’t.
Having read a complaint on this page a week or two back about the Lush Places’ hedges needing trimming, I decided it might be best that I do my best to get them under control as soon as possible, or else someone might decide to “get a man in”.
Trimming the first hedge was progressing as expected when I came across a surprisingly well-established elderflower tree that had self-seeded within the hedge. This necessitated the use of one of my three chainsaws, always an exciting if nerve-wrecking prospect, which requires donning my extensive collection of safety gear, including my protective gloves. These had been sitting on a shelf in the garage all winter minding their own business, which is probably why what unexpectedly happened next happened.
After lugging my gear out to the hedge, donning my chainsaw chaps and popping on my helmet, I pulled on my right glove. As my right index finger settled into place, I felt a bit of a prick. I pulled the glove off again. Could there be a small thorn poking through the glove, I wondered? I peered at it. No, no prickle. So I put the glove back on.
This time, there was more than just a bit of a prick. This time, it definitely had to be classified as a sting. I pulled the glove off and shook it. Out fell a hibernating wasp queen.
That was unexpected, I thought, briefly baffled that I had forgotten to expect the unexpected. Then, in some pain, I got on with getting rid of the elderflower.
