Before I go off on a rant, I would first like to thank everyone who sponsored AJ on her ride. She made it on her six laps of my Mum’s garden and loved every minute of it. The money will go to Florries, a charity that has been providing us with much needed respite care in the shape of the excellent Cathy. Cathy did a lap with AJ, which probably fell outside her remit.
It is really touching to have so many people contribute to this endeavour not only in money but also giving moral support. Obviously it is not a competition but I thought it might be worth pointing put to the more Eurosceptic amongst my readership that the two largest contributions came from either end of the European economic crisis, so vielen dank and muchas gracias, you know who you are.
You might think that what with one thing and another we had our hands full, but no! We have gone and got ourselves some sheep! In our deluded minds this felt like a wonderful idea – living the pastoral dream, reconnecting with nature, teaching the children where the meat they eat really comes from and so on. And to make it all feel even more idyllic these sheep are the descendants of a flock that once belonged to Otto’s Great-Grandfather and were passed to him by his own dear Grandad… Ahhh…
Time for a picture of the little darlings.
What Grandpa failed to mention was that these sheep appear to be the bastard children of Harry Houdini and Steve McQueen’s character from the Great Escape. We put them into what we thought was a sheep-proof field full of the lushest grass imaginable. They took a stroll round the field, casing it for weak points and were out. So we spent a sunny Saturday afternoon chasing sheep around, trying to get them into the field and it really was quite a lark, Otto described it as “A great adventure”. Sunday morning, they look settled, we go off for lunch. Mum calls us, slightly desperate, she, at 82, had spent the afternoon trying to get them back in the field. Spending a Sunday evening in the gathering darkness and driving rain chasing them was not quite such a lark. Otto heard me using words that he had only ever seen spelt out in tiles by his Grandmother playing Scrabble “Daddy said the S-H-I-T word!”
Come Monday morning the joke was definitely over. There were three particularly hardened ones, who would jump though the fence whenever you got near them. Yes, sheep jump, who knew? And the were running onto the road and we were having visions of them causing pile ups, us being sued and all sorts of nightmare scenarios. Fo managed to enlist a couple of parents after dropping off Otto at the school gates and luckily Debbie who does some cleaning for us but was obviously a shepherdess in a previous life was around. And between us all we managed to corral them into Mum’s garden… Where they started to eat her fruit trees!
And there they remain. We stare at each other whenever I am having a fag. They think I am going to crack, but I won’t because all the time I am mentally superimposing this image onto them:
Misliterature 