In which we kill a duck with coffee and kindness, the dog does a Kerouac, and a new sport is invented involving clinging onto the hindquarters of a highly agitated ram – mind you, with a tall, bald Englishman clinging onto its hindquarters even a ram that is ordinarily placid to the point of insensibility is liable to get a little nervous. I think if I had a tall, bald Englishman clinging onto . . . no, let’s not go down that road.

Click here for an excuse

CAST:
Paul and Marusja – owners of the farm
Ben – 84 year old a friend of Paul and Marusja
Alud – a very friendly dog
One flock of sheep and a herd of greedy goats

For some unfathomable reason (aren’t they all?), the diary for May 2006 has gone missing. Strange, really. You would have thought I’d have squirreled away my ineffably superior prose and its sensationally scintillating words with all the tender loving care of a derivatives broker pocketing his bonus, but there you go. However, an e-mail and –even more baffling given that it’s generally not my most vital talent– a memory have surfaced.

None of the customary dramas this time round – no extreme cold, no excessive mud, no sheep mauled by foxes. The worst we had to cope with was an ailing duck that, despite being fed copious quantities of strong sweet coffee and vitamin supplement (or perhaps because of it), eventually succumbed to whatever ailed it and duly died. It must be said, he perked up considerably when he had his morning coffee (“You wouldn’t happen to have a biscuit, would you?”), but the buzz never lasted long and the end seemed inevitable. Given the on-going bird flu scare, the unexplained death of a duck (OD’d on caffeine?) ought to have been mildly alarming. Somehow, in the slightly surreal context of life down here, fears of epidemics, or epidemic fears for that matter, seem utterly irrelevant, literally the concerns of another world.

The duck’s actual demise was quite touching. The other ducks had ignored him throughout his long, coffee-fuelled illness, but three hours before he died, they all gathered around him in a circle and just sort of watched. ‘Touching’ if they were comforting him, but I suppose they might have just been curious. Or maybe they didn’t like him and wanted to make sure.

We disposed of the corpse on a pile of rubble at the corner of the main field, as instructed by Paul: “We have an arrangement with the fox.” I wish the ‘arrangement’ extended to some agreement about not mauling sheep. It would have come in handy last year. Perhaps the fox overlooked that clause.

Alud (recently acquired Pyrenean Mountain Dog) quite took to the region, so much so that she went walkabout to explore further. First few days, she wandered out onto the nearby lane, nosed about a bit, then came back, but one afternoon she just disappeared. Searched high and low, but no sign of her, and the nightmare scenarios started flitting across the brainscape.

I eventually went to the large house across the road (the weekend retreat of a wealthy septuagenarian widow who once shocked the hell out of Ben by receiving him in a state of undress and giving him the old come-hither), and was told that, yes, Alud had been there.

SHE: “Very friendly dog.”

ME: “Yes, I know.”

SHE: “We saw a dog like her this morning in the village at the other end of the valley. So, naturally, when she turned up in the garden, we popped her in the car –she really is very friendly– and dropped her off at the village in the valley.”

Naturally? Dur.

ME: “What? You mean you dropped her off in the village where you saw the dog like her this morning?”

SHE: “No, this village, here, at this end of the valley.”

So, basically, they had taken the trouble to put Alud in the car, drive her a mile away from the house, then turfed her out still ten miles short of where they thought she might have come from, and with a narrow, winding road to negotiate if she was going to get there!

Perhaps the come-hither business was simply senility.

I hot foot it down to the village and keep meeting people who tell me that, yes, Alud had been there (“Lovely dog, very friendly”/“Yes, I know, I know, where is she?”) and each time I miss her by about five minutes as far as I can work out. Then I discover that Alud has taken a shine to this business of getting lifts about the place and has insinuated herself (“Very friendly dog”) into the mayor’s car (the extremely conservative mayor with whom Paul and Marusja have very poor relations), and is currently being driven by his wife to a village on the other side of the valley where there is yet another ‘dog like her’.

“Very friendly?”

“Yup, that’s it. Big and white, too.”

The phone calls carry on throughout the afternoon, the mayor telling us his wife will end up going to the gendarmerie in the local town but he’ll tell her we’re after our dog if she calls, the gendarmes telling us they don’t accept strays anymore but they’ll tell her when she turns up that we’re after our dog, the people at the campsite telling us that when the gendarmes tell her that they don’t accept strays anymore she’ll bring the dog back here and they will see her when she arrives and tell her that we’re after our dog, the mayor between times becoming so addled by our persistent phone calls that he’s beginning to think he’s married to a gendarme who is being driven round the countryside by a large white dog, and I don’t know what else. Eventually, Alud does actually materialize at the campsite (in whose car I wouldn’t know . . . “Very friendly dog.”/”Yes, I know, I know. Oh, God, do I know!”) and is retrieved, having spent the entire day hitchhiking about the local sights.

Very friendly dog.

The other big event was shearing a flock of sheep that had never been sheared before because they were so wild that nobody could catch them. They had to be sheared because Paul and Marusja reckoned the ewes had so many impacted clumps of wool matted about their buttocks that the ram, himself similarly encumbered about the loins, couldn’t do his business.

The technique settled upon for catching them was to drug them (easier said than done since it meant doctoring their food then having a pitched battle with the goats, who normally tuck in first, so that the sheep had time to get stoned) then chasing these allegedly anaesthetized sheep round the field (a field about 500 yards across and over half-a-mile long) to accelerate the soporific effects of the sedative. ‘Anaesthetized’ my eye! They were high as kites. We chased the little sods for the best part of twenty minutes (I haven’t run so much in years), but they seemed blithely indifferent to the potency of whatever it was the vet had prescribed (Benzedrine?), and were still bucking like buggery when we eventually caught them, and they continued bucking like buggery throughout the entire operation.

In the course of the chase, I invented a new sport, Sheep Skiing, in which participants hang onto the hind end of a ram (preferably a ram who’s out of his head) as he gaily gallops across a flint-studded field dragging you along on your knees. Sheep Skiing has many advantages over more conventional varieties of skiing in that it can be practiced throughout the year, no matter what the season or prevailing weather conditions, and requires no costly equipment – basically, all you need is a reasonably sturdy sheep and a big, open space.

Once caught and sat upon by the assembled sheep-chasers, the flock, still vigorously bucking and bleating away like a parliament of politicians (I think they might have been demanding another hit), were duly 'sheared' – with kitchen scissors! Apparently the wool was just too thick and matted for an electric shearer.

After all the crap (I use the word advisedly) had been clipped away, we discovered that the ewes were all thoroughly inseminated (and doubtless full of dizzy, dope-addled lambs by this time), the wool having been sufficiently thick to hide their pregnancy, but not enough to keep a determined ram from doing his business.

Fifteen minutes after the shearing was finished, they all fell asleep.