One of my favourite sentences of all time comes from English diarist and playwright Alan Bennett. It is, “One of my real regrets is that I have never kept a donkey.”
I have never kept a donkey, and never will, but I don’t have to. Our friend Pru, El Presidente of the Donkey and Mule Protection Trust, has more than enough donkeys to go around should anyone have a desire to stroke a donkey’s soft ear. It is a very nice thing to do and you really should do it at least once in your life.
If I didn’t live here at Lush Places, in the wonderful Wairarapa, and was still in Auckland moaning about the humidity, I would have to write that one of my real regrets is that I have never grown a peony. To grow a peony you have to have at least a couple of proper frosts a year. We have proper frosts. Therefore we have peonies.
Now that lambing season is over, the calm that is Lush Places has been restored. I don’t actually have anything much to do with lambing, except to spend a month in a daily state of high anxiety checking on the pregnant ewes, then checking their lambs once born. Lambing is lovely, and sometimes traumatic. Lambs live. They thrive and get as fat as plum puddings. Or they wither. Sometimes they die. It is all part of life in the confines of the paddocks.
It is very nice to wake up early right now to the shrill calls of lambs who have mislaid their mamas, and the answering and reassuring calls of the mamas. It is like a sheep opera. Our wonderfully nutty and wholly adorable rural postie, June, when witnessing the sheep galloping towards me shouting raucously in anticipation of biscuits, said, “They’re singing to you!”
The bird song begins early, too. The fantails chirrup, the blackbirds chatter or whistle, the red-breasted chaffinches rattle away, melodically, like tiny choristers.
If anybody had suggested 10 years ago, say, that I would be spending most of my days talking to sheep, having swapped my $400 knee-high boots for poo-covered gumboots, I’d have said they were mad.
Sometimes, still, there is a tone of slight incredulity in old Auckland friends that we abandoned a supposedly sophisticated, cultured city life for sheep. In other words, they still think we are mad.
Here are three reasons to give the finger to city life: Sheep, obviously, because they are the best pets you can ever hope to have (although taming wild country cats to sleep on your bed comes close). Never, or seldomly, having to hear your neighbours. We occasionally hear a chainsaw or the pop-pop-pop of a gun taking down a rabbit (good) or a tractor in a field. This is infinitely preferable to living next door to that teenager whose parents deemed it acceptable to let her throw parties where kids threw up in bushes. Or to the neighbours who demolished our stone boundary wall and employed a conman – who had formerly been exposed by Fair Go – to build a fortress wall between our houses. Built without footings, it had, on our side, plastic take-away forks stuck in the cement.
Living in the city you are forced to overhear inane utterances. Such as this one from the father of the vile teenager, while barbecuing: “Mmm. Moist patties.” Moist patties is still the code for “tosser” at our place.
We have traded tossers for peonies. It is a good trade. The first peony is out today. It is one of our favourite peonies. It is a delicately pale pink and intensely fragrant. We don’t know which peony it is. It was here when we arrived. It seems to have tripled in size this year and has dozens of buds. Such a peony is one of the great joys of life at Lush Places. It is as nice as stroking a donkey’s ear.
