Okay, you might have heard enough about lambs for a bit. Tough luck. This is about my last lamb. And as The Good Life functions as a sort of Births, Deaths and Marriages chronicle of life at Lush Places, I am compelled to write about him. Also, I am feeling quite sad about the prospect of next spring not having a new lamb to welcome. Properly, this lamb is the last for my bottle-raised pet sheep Elizabeth Jane. Elizabeth Jane is coming up 7. She is an old girl now.
I swore I wouldn’t name him. But he gallops up to me every time I go into Apple Tree paddock. He wants to play. And be stroked. He loves me. I love him. This way disaster lies. He is a ram lamb. If I kept him, which I want to do more than just about anything in the world, he would become an enormous ram who could easily run me down, amorously.
This is what happened with Elizabeth Jane’s last ram lamb, Reginald, who knocked me over from behind, wrecking my knee, and then came in from the front with a loving butt to my nose. This was despite my having had his bits rendered redundant.
You try not falling in love with a lamb. You rub their stomachs and they waggle their tails. You can play chase with them and they leap, with gay abandon, sideways, in the air.
Our little flock are grandmamas now. I came across No 103 in the Orchard Tree paddock the other day. She was friendly. I gave her a biscuit and looked up her number in my Book of Sheep, I said to Greg: “It’s Sophie!” She has her own lovely lamb. Sophie is one of Xanthe’s first twin lambs. So, Greg is a grandfather. Sort of.
Have I named my last lamb? Of course I have. He’s called Rupert. My friend Pru asked: “Does he have a tartan scarf and trousers?”
Rupert does not. Nor does he get about in gumboots, and certainly not a pair of “leather-lined Le Chameau Chasseur” boots, which are not only “hand-crafted by one single master boot maker”, but also the cause of what can only be called Gumboot-gate – or should that be Gumboot-farmgate? – in rural Britain.
The UK’s Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Steve Reed, has got himself in a pickle after being photographed wearing a pair of these fancy wellies, which are obviously awfully posh, because not only do they have a French name, they go for 420 quid (NZ$909) a pair.
Worse still, he didn’t buy them. They were a gift from one of the directors of this luxury gumboot business, one Lord Alli, who also caused a kerfuffle by funding the wardrobes of Labour PM Keir Starmer and his wife.
Lord Alli is clearly on a mission to raise the sartorial standards of the Labour lot, which, you could argue, is a worthy mission. No, you couldn’t.
The fanciness of Reed’s boots isn’t the reason he’s in the pickle, however. It is because they were listed in his register of minister’s interests as being worth only £270, which is £30 below the amount allowed for gifts, but also a hell of a lot less than their retail value.
British farmers, already steaming like a silage pile over Labour’s hikes in inheritance taxes, have been further provoked by the poshness of Reed’s gumboots. Real farmers don’t wear flash gumboots, “because,” as one told the Telegraph, “we’re getting them covered in muck every day”.
We here at Lush Places pretend to be real farmers. We wear Red Bands. They cost about $80. We bought our first pairs the week we moved to Wairarapa. They looked embarrassingly new, which revealed us – as if any revealing was required – like recently arrived townies. The first thing we did when we got them home was cover them in muck.
