Late night vision - sloshed slob chomping chops

I decided the pet lambs, Ashley and Mary Kate, would retain special privileges when, at three in the morning, I was feeding Cliff, a lamb who didn’t make the grade.

I was crouched over Cliff with warm lamb milk dribbling up the sleeve of my dressing gown when I had a vivid vision of a seriously sloshed stock broker at a party in London gnawing on one of Cliff’s ribs. 

The detail was extraordinary.  He was overweight (I noticed he ate all the fat) and carried his excess round the hips like a certain former Prime Minister. 

He wore a pin-striped suit, a finely striped white shirt with the top button undone and a loosened tie bearing a club emblem.  Between chomping on Cliff’s chop, this glutton (let’s call him Hugo - with apologies to all Hugos) slurped really expensive champagne.  I didn’t see the bottle, but fancy it was Perrier Jouet from one of those classy bottles with embossed flowers.

Hair:  mousy brown and floppy.  Face:  a tad flabby and pale.  

The only good thing about the hallucination was that rather than being in a gracious home, Hugo was in the grotty kitchen of a grungy flat Kiwis are wont to call home during their OE.    

Hugo haunted me. While I was up in the night nurturing a lamb, he was gorging on bits of Cliff in a pre-Christmas orgy with no respect for the wee creature that had given its life for his gastronomic bliss.

A day later Cliff went to lamb heaven and I vowed to keep Mary-Kate and Ashley as pets.  This involved training them to eat bread so they’d stick around, fencing them out of the section and, trickiest of all, convincing the farmer this is a good idea.

When he found them eyeing his precious strawberries, the farmer merely shunted them into the paddock and threatened to cut their tails off.  As he’s done this with calm alacrity to thousands of lambs, but was using it as a threat to the pets I knew I had him

He then reinforced the post and rail fence at the bottom of the paddock, but filling gaps under the batten and wire fence was going to be tricky.  I told him I planned to tie garden mesh onto the bottom wire and fix it to the ground with huge wire staples.

He listened to my Mickey Mouse idea, sighed deeply and said, “Let me do it.” 

“What a guy,” I thought dreamily - for two days at which time he told me he had no recollection of our conversation. 

“What a guy!” I thought, with somewhat different emphasis.

I then agreed with his plan to let the lambs go while praying they’d be too fat and woolly to slither under the fence into our garden.  They promptly merged with the flock, herd instinct being stronger than their love for sandwich loaf.