How to Rear a Well-Adjusted Lamb

Life’s tough, and the world is a cold cruel place. I understand this. Does my little lamb Baby Cakes understand this? I don’t know. But I look into Babby’s eye when she rests her chin in my cupped hand and I think ‘the whole world is here, the whole world is in this eye’.

Lesson: Do transfer your existential angst onto your lamb. They’re orphaned, so they’re vulnerable and will absorb your emotional instability readily. Enjoy creating your legacy.

Babby’s whole life this far has been a series of “What fresh hell is this?” episodes. Her mother died, she and her twin brother were found crying over her cold carcass. Her brother died, I found her crying over his cold carcass.

Then her tail was banded but her distress and discomfort was so great that she ended up having the whole thing sawed off with a cold knife. Lots of blood flowed from her hind quarters. Two days later maggots were found occupying the stump. This is strange; given that it is mid-winter and there are seemingly no flies, but Babby was a problem lamb from the get go.

Lesson: Do worry if you see your tail-less lamb rubbing her junk all over spiky shrubbery in an unusually agitated manner. It may mean maggots have moved in. Don’t worry about blood splatter stains, though. In fact, adopt a laisser-faire attitude toward all excretions and emulsions. They will be plentiful. Your gag reflex will adapt.

Babby was terribly lonely without her brother Boo Boo. She cried. She didn’t want to be alone in what was their yard anymore. I put her there and she panicked. She raced the length of it and then she jumped the fence and came crying to the kitchen door. After this scene repeated itself ten or twelve times I relented and let her roam free. Her idea of roaming free consisted of loitering on the front veranda. This is now her home base. By day she denudes overhanging shrubbery and destroys potted plants, by night she sleeps under my bedroom window and snores gently.

Lesson: Brothers make lives better.

Sheep are burdened with a reputation for being brainless. This is entirely unwarranted. Sheep are furnished with sufficient brains to suit their lifestyles. How much mental exertion does it take to stroll through pastures grazing and socialising and cultivating fine fleece and once a year yielding to a muscular shearer for the entire term of your life? Not a great deal. 

Any more than what they have would be wasteful. Any more would turn them into pigs. We don’t want that. We know what happens with pigs – they loll like crocodiles in their own stinking slop waiting for their caretakers to trip and fall, or suffer a stroke in their presence, AND THEN THEY EAT THEM.

Pigs are sinister and cannot be trusted. Also, their eyes are beady and grotesque. There is no whole world in their eyes. There are appetites in their eyes. Also, Orwell was right. There is every chance that, given the opportunity, pigs will rise up onto two legs and morph into totalitarian tyrants.  

Lesson: Piglets are sweet but pigs are scary. Given half a chance they WILL attempt to take over your farmyard. Keep pigs at your own peril. 

I have many anecdotes about pigs, and most of them are alarming.  Some are unsavoury enough to render them unfit for publication, even in a two-bit blog such as this. Growing up in the Bega Valley, our nearest neighbor was a pig farmer. As a side-project, he captured deadly snakes. The area was rife with death adders. They are a particularly lethal and grotesque snake. He was highly paranoid and heavily bearded, and he lived in dilapidated hermetic squalor. At one time, he had a prize sow. He had named her Lady Diana and she was the jewel in his crown. He treasured her so much that we speculated he installed her in his ramshackle house of a night to provide her with the comfort befitting a treasured and royal pig. He can’t have, though, because one night wild dogs came down from the bush and killed Lady Diana.

Things got a bit strange after that. Eventually, neighbourly relations broke down entirely. 

There are lessons here too numerous to count.

I watched some trashy reality show once; I don’t remember which but it was about repo men in West Virginia or some hick place so obviously it was excellent, and in it there was this large and amorous woman called Big Juicy and she said “I’m gonna lay his ass down and whomp on him like a damn hog on slop”.  

There is a peripheral lesson here and it is this: Don’t ever question whether you watch too much television. There is no such thing as too much television. If anyone else ever questions you, do as I do. Say “I read good books and I watch bad television.” Keep a few additional derogatory and patronizing comments about what you assume (rightly or wrongly, it doesn’t matter) the accuser reads up your elitist sleeve in case an argument ensues. Colleen McCulloch, Ken Follett, Bryce Courtenay and Dan Brown are always reliable vehicles for discrediting a person’s intelligence entirely. 

Anyways, sheep are very underrated. My favourite feature is their hair-trigger twitchiness. They are always prepared to bolt; they keep themselves in a state of cat-like readiness. And don’t let their boxy, bony-legged appearance fool you. They are fit. I drove my car at speed through a flock of sheep the other day and one tripped, at full tilt, lost its footing, rolled, flipped and resumed its footing all in a split second. It was as athletic a maneuver as any NRL winger could manage IF HE WAS LUCKY. I was so impressed I tooted my horn.

Lesson: Sheep appreciate positive feedback as much as the next animal.

For a while there Babby was my lamb of the various sorrows. Lambs are supposed to be international symbols of youth, innocence, sweetness, and all those nice things. Babby was young, yes, but she was sad and scared, lonely as a cloud. Things changed when I got a calf.  I called her Claudia. Babby thinks she is the sun and the stars. The whole thing is like a love story out of a Nicholas Sparks novel.  

Lesson: Occasionally, things actually get better. Shocking, I know.

Dave Taylor is Dense - Part 1, of many

Last week was a big one. Heavy. Between Katie giving Tom the slip and Origin putting me through the wringer and then the Raiders upsetting the Storm in fabulous fashion and my baby lamb having her tail cut off and given to the farm dog to run around with in her mouth as a chew toy for the next two days the damage to my nerves has been considerable.

Regardless, the rat-wheel keeps on rolling.

It rolled out a rude truth about Queensland and the Maroons. I needed something to ease the pain of the Blues’ substandard performance in game three, so this is medicinal – it is balm, soothing and smooth, a cool hand on a hot fevered forehead.

Even so, these Queenslanders, they are trying my patience.

Research (vague, sullen rumination) revealed to me that the players who have migrated to the southern states for club football seem to have rounded themselves out, as players and as people. Publically, definitely, and probably privately too, although in a world where ET can be exposed as a sordid philanderer you never know for sure do you? Anyway, these migrated players have grown gracious and civilised. They are in possession of their wits. Sometimes they even use them. Think Darius Boyd, David Shillington and the Big Three.

Those who have continued indulging in an alternative, soft-edged reality by staying in Queensland are charmless, devoid of grace. Their wits are slower, their vowels are flatter, and they play like dogs. Justin Hodges is a dog. Brent Tate, Ben Hannant, Sam Thaiday, Corey Parker: dogs! Mongrels, hurling themselves repeatedly against chainmail fencing and seeking to separate toddler’s faces from their skulls.    

The exception here is Dave Taylor. He went south, yes, but it didn’t exactly take, did it*?  As such, he will soon be returning to his shallow-end-of-the-gene-pool roots, having signed to play for Gold Coast next year. The rigours of polite Sydney society were obviously too much for this unreconstructed behemoth. This doesn’t surprise. He is a caveman. He looks like his concept of food storage does not extend beyond the hanging of a carcass within a cave. He also looks insufferably, unspeakably stupid. The fact that he signed a major deal with the Titans at the height of their much publicised financial meltdown, while they were reportedly struggling to pay their current players, is clear evidence of his dwindling cerebral resources. Here is some more:  

In the olden days, before the advent of emoticons, floriography was the go. People would exchange flowers to convey emotions. This went far beyond our unsubtle use of red roses, a tacky signifier of relationship-based guilt available to buy in well-stocked service stations. A tuberose, for example, signified voluptuousness, heather expressed admiration, and primrose said I can’t live without you.  

So, say I handed Dave Taylor scarlet geraniums. Scarlet geraniums indicate stupidity. He would probably eat them on sight but if he cared to respond he could hand me a daisy, saying “I share your sentiment” a general geranium, which would say “you are childish”, or a bay leaf: “I change but in death, bitch.”

Dave Taylor is so dense that he had to be told to take up a hobby. By a coach. He complied, because he is nothing if not dim and pliant, and bought a boat to catch fish from.

Dave Taylor is so dense that he fell out of bed at Origin training camp and sustained a semi-serious head injury. Or so the Maroons would have us believe. Even if he didn’t fall out of bed, even of this was an excuse that they invented to cover up evidence of mass team drunkenness, the fact that they allocated him an alibi involving falling out of a bed speaks volumes. Do you know what it says? It says ‘we believe that you will believe that this is a man too stupid to lie safely in a bed.’

Do you think they would have assigned the same excuse to Billy Slater, or Cameron Smith, or Cooper Cronk? Of course not. They would have said they strained their eyes in an all-night, three-way chess marathon or something.

Southerners will appreciate where I am going with this. Queenslanders will have snagged their slow-moving, sub-par minds on the mention of carcasses hanging in caves two paragraphs up. They will not make it this far.  Story of their lives.

*See also: Nate Myles. Combine a heavy team drinking session in Terrigal with unreconstructed ablution habits and what do you get?  An un-house-broken Queenslander taking a dump in a carpeted hotel corridor, that’s what.

- Johnathan Thurston is excluded from all of this for obvious reasons – these being that he is an unearthly being who transcends time, space, place and state lines.  He’s really good-looking, in other words. A stone-cold fox.  (Lillies, Calla – magnificent beauty)