Which of my ewes, Miles the sheep farmer inquired, was the mama of #295? She, that is #295, was the sister of Reggie, he added helpfully. Reggie was once my pet ram lamb who, in an over-exuberant display of affection, knocked me down, buggered my knee and butted me in the nose for good measure.
Ewe #295, is, I think, Rosie. I have been a little lax in keeping my Book of Sheep up to date. Also, it is chaotically kept. Much like its author.
Miles wanted to know about Rosie’s matrilineal line because she has been playing up in the milking shed. She is, he wrote, “naughty and refuses to leave once milked”. Of course she does. There’s food on offer in the shed. She’s not stupid, just like her mother. Miles likely suspected this was Elizabeth Jane, my first pet lamb, who still lives with us in the apple tree paddock. And he’s right.
Miles keeps a whiteboard in the milking shed listing the names of sheep banned from entering. The first name on the list – and this fills me with something like matrilineal pride – is Elizabeth Jane. When Miles attempted to milk her, she used to kick up merry hell and kick off the milking cups. That’s my girl.
All of our animals are, to greater or lesser degrees, badly behaved. They don’t respond well to being told what to do. If one of the cats dares to go anywhere near the chickens, it gets chased and, occasionally, pecked on the head. We are fairly sure that the evil birds poop, with forethought, wherever they calculate we are likely to walk and then cackle with glee at the sound of us cursing when we walk said poo into the house.
The cats, meantime, do as they like, as cats will. If you tell them to stop clawing the carpet they look at you with utter contempt and scratch the carpet even more enthusiastically.
If you attempt to play with them with any of the ridiculous number of cat toys on offer they will run off with the toy and take it under the bed, where there is a repository of stolen and impossible-to-retrieve cat paraphernalia. Then they caper off outside and sit by the cabbage tree until you give in and play with them with a cabbage tree leaf.
I am forever coming upon my pristinely made-up beds to find that the cats have attacked the blankets and thrown them about the place. It is the cat equivalent of giving the fool who mistakenly believes herself to be in control the finger.
Why are our animals so badly behaved? You can only blame the parents. The parents have never responded well to being told what to do. Greg was once told by an editor that the trouble with his attitude to authority was that he just liked saying “bum” to mother.
I once got into a loopy argument with an editor – and it was literally loopy; it went round and round in circles until one of us lost the will to live. And it wasn’t me. The argument was about my performance review, those meaningless measures of god knows what. I had always been given the highest score possible from my previous beloved and respected editor, who had selfishly retired, the bastard. My new editor dropped my score to one below the top score. Why? Because he didn’t give top scores. Had my performance dropped, I asked? No, but he didn’t give top scores. Well, I said, I accepted only top scores.
The whole argument was so insane, not to mention illogical, that I just started laughing. Slightly hysterically. It was like a scene from The Office, or perhaps Severance.
That performance review was never signed off. I sometimes imagine it drifting, ghost-like and forever after, around the offices of that newspaper looking for somebody, anybody, to sign it.
By the way, the short answer to the question about why Rosie is so badly behaved in the milking shed is that she, like her mother before her, just likes saying “bum” to mother. We have trained them right. They’re our girls.
