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.

Advanced lessons in possum disposal

Here’s a possum control method I’ll bet you’ve never thought of - invite an army-trained marksman around for dinner then, when you’re having pre-dinner drinks and the dogs go crazy because they’ve seen a possum, send him outside with a gun. 

In this case, the possum made it past the dogs and clambered onto the roof where it mistakenly thought it was safe and peered over the edge to watch the cavorting dogs. 

One tidy gunshot later, the possum was dead while poor shotgun-shy Kate the dog raced inside and attempted to climb onto my lap while I was perched on a bar stool. 

Disposal via sharp shooter proved simpler than getting rid of the possum which, unbeknown to us, had settled into the house.

Late one evening I closed the door to the back upstairs terrace - it had been open for several days. Late that night after walking upstairs, I found myself eye-to-eye with a possum which had been coming and going to his nest in what we quaintly call our ‘painting room’, i.e. it’s filled with unmentionable clutter. 

By the time the farmer and his gun came to the rescue, the possum had returned to its day-time hideaway. It was curtains when it emerged the next night; the farmer was ready with the gun.

Another possum who’d made this room its home was shot one evening after he jumped from the terrace to a nearby banana palm where he sat blinking in the torchlight. 

Possums also make homes out of leaves on the roof. We hear them after they make navigation errors and slide down the steep roof then tumble to the ground. It’s no big deal as they’re almost indestructible.

One day the farmer was on the roof with a guy who sells mesh to keep leaves out of guttering when they encountered a possum which nimbly avoided them, flew through the air, ducked past the dogs and fled to live another day. 

Pity our sharp shooter friend wasn’t here; he’d have got it in mid air with one well-placed shot.

Olive-picking peasants get rosy cheeks

An invitation to spend a day picking olives with other “rosy-cheeked peasants” promised a harvest lunch and eligibility for a bottle of oil. I thought the idea sounded great, but should have been warned when Rex chose to go fishing instead.

I was first to arrive and, for an anxious moment, wondered if the other peasants knew something I didn’t. But they dribbled in and soon eight of us were hard at it.

The reason peasants are rosy-cheeked soon became apparent. They’re hot and bothered from all that hard work. And you never hear about the cricked necks they get from picking olives above head height.

At least olive trees have flexible branches and you don’t get stabbed by sharp twigs. We wore gloves so we could run our hands down the branches and soon the air was filled with the gentle thud of olives raining on the old sheets and curtains we had lain on the ground.

We picked from two types of tree: Koroneiki from Greece whose tiny olives yield lots of tasty oil, and J5, the progeny of a massive tree planted in the 1850’s by Far North settlers. The latter trees have been so unimaginatively-named that we olive picking peasants have a plea to people high up in olive circles - come up with more poetic names.

After each tree was picked, we’d pour the harvest into cane baskets which reinforced our sense of peasantness, and plastic laundry baskets which didn’t.

It was tedious work so it’s no wonder olive grove owners joke nervously that after a couple of harvests they’ve worked their way through all their friends. Tellingly, a couple who'd planned to plant 20 trees on their lifestyle block decided after a few hours that three would be a good number. 

By lunchtime we suspected today’s peasants would watch our labours with bemusement because they would sensibly buy olive oil from their local supermarket.

This was our friends’ third olive harvest. In their first year they were done by lunchtime, whereas this was a two-day mission that produced 350kg of olives. After being cleaned, separated from twigs and leaves then pressed, the harvest yielded an (apparently) impressive 42.7 litres of oil, or 122 350ml bottles.

Back home I proudly showed my digital photos of the trailer-load of olives we’d picked to the farmer who said if he’d had the camera he could have shown me the monster snapper that got away.

After a few hours sunning himself in a boat, he’d caught enough fish for several feeds, whereas I'd slaved all day for a cup and a half of olive oil - plus a delicious lunch and a few glasses of wine which were so enjoyable I suspect I’ll show up for next year’s harvest.

Kate's jumping trick

This photo, published in Your Home & Garden, shows Kate relaxing - or she could be plotting to jump through the window of the ute....

Luckily Kate wasn’t hurt when she collided with the driver’s window of the truck in much the same fashion as a bug hitting a vehicle windscreen. Nor was her self esteem dented.  Kate is a heading dog whose inflated sense of self worth was evident from the moment we got her.

As a pup she travelled in the cab of the ute but, unlike the other dogs, she has never adjusted to the degrading business of being relegated to the ute’s tray.

She’s so fond of being a front-seat passenger that if the farmer won’t let her travel first class and there’s a load on the back of the ute, she’ll sometimes stay at home.

But as Kate loves going places, urgent action is called for and she jumps through the driver’s window. It’s startling, but her judgment’s impeccable. 

The first time she did this when I was at the wheel, I’d just nosed the truck up a grassy slope when Kate flew through the driver’s window. She brushed my left shoulder as she passed in front of me, then she landed on a pinhead on the passenger’s seat.   

As she finds it fun to chase the farmer on the tractor, seconds later she bounded out the window, only to fly back in again a few minutes later. She even does this when both Rex and I are in the cab, ending up on my lap. Her landings are always elegant.

As Kate is a muddy and unpleasant passenger in winter, the farmer tried to train her out of the habit. Each time she looked poised to jump, he’d wind up the window. But on one occasion Kate was airborne. Too late! She went splat against the window with a thump and scrabble of paws.

As she’s lean, super fit and hard as a world-class athlete, she promplty bounced onto the back of the ute where she possibly muttered, “Bugger!”

Kate’s other downfall, besides nicking the cats’ food, is that she’s overly affectionate. Pay her the slightest attention and she’s all over you - except when she’s a front seat passenger.

Then she sits bolt upright and stares ahead, barely deigning to give you a passing glance. You feel like a chauffeur for a haughty aristocrat and, what’s more, your short-term contract is under review.

Now the ground has dried out, Kate’s back to her tricks. She can regularly be found in the cab and when the ute’s parked at home, she hops in and out of the driver’s window as she pleases.

And when she’s out on the farm, the farmer will be fencing, fixing troughs or whatever and Kate will loll in the truck listening to Sports Radio at full volume. 

While she’s clearly pleased to see the end of winter’s muck and mud, we’re already hoping for rain.