Somebody at Business Wairarapa has come up with a genius idea: Monopoly – the Wairarapa edition. I am not being sarcastic, although I may have been known to be sarcastic in the past. The past being earlier today.
In my family, and here at Lush Places, sarcasm is not regarded as the lowest form of wit. We regard sarcasm as the very highest form of wit.
The greatest compliment I have ever been paid came from a woman I was interviewing who had known my grandfather, Les. She said, “I can see that you’ve inherited your grandfather’s talent for sarcasm.” I wanted to tell my grandfather this – he would have been proud of me for the first time ever – but unfortunately, he happened to be dead at the time.
To have your logo on a property square on the Wairarapa edition of Monopoly costs between $2000 and $2500. We can’t afford to buy a space, but if we could I’d want the “Go to Jail” square. Then I could go about Masterton putting people in the clink.
These people would include that woman who, seeing me obviously heading for the fish van queue, sped up so that she could nip in before me. It would also include that slob who discarded his quarter-full takeaway coffee into a trolley at the supermarket.
I will be handing down a sentence of life without the possibility of parole to that dipshit (he knows who he is) who decided it would be “just a bit of fun” to let his kids chase and, thus terrify, our heavily pregnant ewes.
We were big Monopoly players in our house when we were growing up. My little brother, Simon, always won. He was a big cheater. He would pinch money from the bank and hide it under his side of the board. It’s all part of the game. Monopoly is a game of capitalism. It’s all about whatever you can get away with and that is usually what you can get away with by using somebody else’s money.
I’ve just been out in the garden herding our four pet sheep back into their paddock after their early evening outing.
I do this every evening when it is so dry and the grass so meagre. I also do it because it is such fun. The ewes do not take much enticing to come out, or go back in. Buckets of sheep nuts and pockets of cashew nuts are involved in the getting back in.
The getting out simply involves the unlatching of a gate. It is a joyous outing for all of us. They eat the last of the plums. They also eat my delphiniums, cut down after an initial flowering with hopes of a second flush. Oh, bugger the delphiniums. What price joy?
Last night, we twirled and danced and kicked up our heels as though we were all lambs again. This is just what Xanthe and Elizabeth Jane did when they arrived here at Lush Places as day-old orphan lambs, full of the jubilation of just being alive. They are old girls now, our sheep, as am I. They are coming up to seven years. I still call them my lambs.
Becky is a few years younger. She was Speri’ment’s lamb. She was an enormous lamb and got stuck on the way out of the birth canal. She was the first lamb I delivered. I feel a special bond with her. She mostly ignores me.
I am reading another book about sheep. I am often reading a book about sheep. The latest is The Wisdom of Sheep & Other Animals, by an English farmer, Rosamund Young. Rosamund would be a good name for a lamb.
She notes that contrary to what city folk think, sheep have individual personalities. If you’d told me that six years ago, I’d have scoffed. They also have individual voices. We can tell which of our sheep is calling even when we can’t see them. Some sheep are friendly and some are snooty. Like Greta Garbo’s character in Grand Hotel, Becky wants “to be alone”.
