For The Love of a Cold Climate

I love spring  way down country at 45 degrees south. When winter shrivels and dies and Grand Dame Mother Nature comes a creeping out of every crack and cavity of the underworld, gradually carpeting winters browns and beige in a tidal wave of GREEN. In a massive UP-You. Take that. Dull EARTH. No mind what crises are going down over the globe, Ebola, a molten lava river in Hawaii, Robbie Williams having a viral-kid, Ms Nature forges on.

Not even,bi- weekly polar storms billowing up her under-skirts can hold back her verdant takeover. Her lush pasture, her leafy  hay-fever inducing tree tips, her scented blossoms, her lamby  lambs born of mutton, her busy bees, her courting birds, her Watership down worthy rabbit populace. Etcetera. 

She's the mother of all mothers. 

I bought a pair of gorgeous summer sandals in October. Kathryn Wilson, Olivia Heels. Hot pink.  I’m wearing them now. Pair No. 33 of 254 limited edition beauties. I spoke to shoe designer and mummy-to-be KW in store. She was charming. It made for a happy parting of cash. There’s nothing like the feel of your feet in supple ruminant skin, while at home, by yourself. WRITING.  As soon as I put them on and walked to my desk, I looked into one of many forgotten file folders, by way of procrastination and knock me over with a new suede shoe, there I found a crisp fifty dollar note. A note I promptly  HID in my rainy day shoe purchase piggy bank. And continued writing…

Minutes before the sun had come out, the newly resident Tui couple lobble lobble lobble click croak clicked in the kowhai tree below my window and the daytime temperature rose to at least 14 degrees. So I’d walked over to pick a spring onion from the greenhouse and guess what I found on the pond? I’ll tell you in case you can’t work out from this snap, taken without the appropriate lens. It’s a family of ten. Mum and Dad, Paradise Ducks with eight fluffy ducklings. Never seen before. But must have hatched nearby.

The joys of spring continued because earlier in the day I received a package all the way from Barcelona. I’d been expecting it. BIG thanks to my birthday twin. I couldn’t open it straightaway. I wanted to savour its much promised arrival. The packaging was exquisite. All nouveau stylish. Not hipster, but beyond. Inside was a pair of Malababa gold earrings. I fell in love. This is what they look like on. Delicate.

I’ve been over-thinking things of late. It was stifling. Me. It wasted time, like all those people who over-thought pop star Robbie Williams and his wife, Ayda, live-video-tweeting the 24 hour birth of their second son. (8 lbs 1 oz FYI). Some feminist were up in arms at him singing his hit song, Candy as wifey panted her way through another contraction. Kind of showy weird. But so what. I thought.

I sang a song to The H when I was experiencing a very nasty rapid fire 3 hour 45 minute induced labour with our second daughter. The lyrics were not particularly well thought out and screeched in high falsetto - ‘don’t come near me or I’ll cut your cock off’. He just dabbed a rough soggy hanky on my brow, not that I was sweating. He can’t sing.

The last time I heard Robbie Williams talk about childbirth was on The Graham Norton Show. When asked what it was like being present at the birth of his first child, he replied candidly, ‘it was like watching your favourite pub burn down.’

Call me crass, but I actually thought that was quite a sweet and honest comment coming from a bloke. The H kept well away from the business end with number 2, after a 29 ½ marathon down at the fun park with the first. I’m just glad my neck is short and I didn’t have the option. To watch.

Although, I did make myself watch ONE of the Robbie live-birth-tweet-videos (by way of research). It was the post birth edit. Thank goodness. Proud dad, still slightly drugged mum, both elated, ecstatic, over joyed and overcome at birth of their son and the fact they’d been able to SHARE it.

Mother Nature at its vainest primal best. 

Bring it on.SPRING.

 
ps. Thinking is not writing.
pps. Thanks to Sonya Cisco for her stream of consciousness prompt this week.

A Horse Riding Chicken

The other day I discovered one of our five hens had a bottle green foot. Crikey. I rang the vet. They quoted $65 for: consultation and three days of antibiotic injections in their hen hospital. I wanted to drive her round straight away. Get her treatment started. She was obviously in pain, sat there nibbling grass. 

‘Will she fully recover?’ I asked.

‘We have a pretty good response with egg bound hens,’ the receptionist replied.

A $65 vet bill for an $18 pullet, which may or may not continue to be a productive layer - didn’t stack up.

‘We could buy three new chickens for that price,’ said daughter, 14, matter-of-factly. She was right. 3.6 pullets to be precise. Or 2 pullets and a bag of layer mash.

I rubbed a liberal dollop of Savlon into my hen’s hot foot. It was a feeble gesture. Her jew claw was bloody. She must have been stomped on by one of our horses. Despite grazing in close proximity, to date, our horses have never stood on the small two-legged members of their herd. Even during the more fool-hardy game the hens play of - who can eat the most smelly hoof pickings, while the hooves are being picked - they have avoided mishap. Beats me why they like that fetid dirt. Although, I have seen them gobble dead mice and fight over a rotted possum head before.

This equine/ avian friendship is so relaxed, one time a hen flew aboard my horse’s rump. Then she casually started racking her claws through his malting winter coat. Said steed arched his back in enjoyment. For years the horses have poked their bums up to the hen house in bleak southerlies. And the hens employed equine umbrellas. More miraculously, the small herd has happily shared many a repast of meadow hay. 

I fessed up to the blacksmith the next day. We always have a chin wag about animal husbandry. ‘We had to kill one of our chooks. Its leg was totally green. One of the horses stood on it.’ I explained the cost of the vet.

‘You could have chopped it off,’ he suggested.

Naturally, at first, I believed him. ‘The leg? Just chopped it off? Not cauterized it?’ I asked.

‘Nah, you’d have to get the vet to do it,’ he said. ‘So you’d be in the same position. Expensive eggs, aren’t they? Nice though.’

The next day I read in our local rag about Paul the Wildlife Keeper. He talked about an ‘on-the-job incident to haunt him’ … It was about a falcon and a farmer who’d tried to perform surgery on it… he’d amputated the bird's wing… it had got horribly infected…weeks later he’d dropped the (very sick) bird into the Park’s rehab unit. Apparently, he thought he was doing the right thing. Crikey.

As I divided up our leftover crispy salmon skin into four and put it in the chook bucket, I thought a pang of sadness for that faithful, horse-loving hen. It may have been the heavily malting chook I’d nursed back to health in the winter; with gentle doses of apple cider vinegar. (They’re all red hybrids our hens. I can’t tell them apart). At least the end was quick. And I know who to call if it happens again.

Keeping hens in your city backyard seems to be a must-have at the moment. You’re allowed 6-12 under most council bylaws. But thankfully no roosters. Or horses. 

Hungry Birds - A New Game

'Feed the birds and they will come' - I read that somewhere. Once. And in winter I do feed the birds. I leave vessels of sugar water and carefully wedged over ripe windfall fruit in the v-pronged branches of otherwise bare fruit trees. And the native birds do come.

Last week, thanks to loads of super sweet pears, there was veritable bird-binge-fest going on in the orchard. I worried for hoards of avian waist lines. They gorged themselves. A roman feast with feathers in tact. So drunk on sugar were these birds I could stand a metre away with outstretched arms, camera on full zoom snapping away. At one point a Tui and a Bellbird sucked sweet nectar alongside one another. Then four Bellbirds in a pear tree, including teenage offspring, guzzling.

Tuis are trickier to photograph though they like to keep watch from above, they're more nervy, dip in, zip out.Will not pose. Hence there are none below.

Bellbirds are the parrot green ones, they're about the size of your hand from the tip of their curved beak to the end of their tail. If you want to hear them sing click here. Waxeyes are the ones with thick white kohl around their eyes, they're tiny, about twice the size of a hummingbird.

I'll gladly admit to being a crazy-native-bird-lady, I love them. Especially when they come to visit. I love them even more when I manage to get an in focus shot. Don't let our native birds starve this winter. Feed em!

Help Thy Neighbour

Most of us are trying to sell something. My absentee neighbours have been trying to sell their historic stone cottage with two well kept acres for yonks. 

One frost free Sunday over the winter, I decided to do some passive front gate selling myself.  I piled up horse poo in the front paddock, shovelled it into empty Tux dog biscuits sacks and tied them securely with green binder twine snipped off hay bales. It was eco-mama-recycle-Michael and green-waste-for-cash all in one.

The kids refused to help. They sat inside checking facebook while watching TV. Thankfully one relented and painted a sign for me in vibrant red. So I finished the job by arranging my wares beneath the posh navy blue real estate sign on our shared driveway.

Sadly, like some of my other creative marketing pursuits this horse poo malarkey has not been a big earner. It didn’t help that the kids bolted up the drive and hurled my five sacks, into the nearby ditch, if any visitor of note was due. Potential boyfriends, birthday party guests and the like. 

On more than one occasion my wares were obscured from view, languishing in a muddy drain for weeks at a time.

However, last Thursday three months after going on-sale, four sacks went missing. Holy Toledo. Had the kids hidden them completely or had some urban gardener decided my horsey poo was the gas. Looking under my cast to one side sign I discovered to my delight two damp $5 notes. I promptly put them in our, ‘family travel’ jar. 

Then I grabbed four empty horse feed sacks and raced over to a pile of HP in the orchard. Glorious stuff. It had composted its cloddy clompy self over winter. It was like that pure black powder you pay $15+ at the garden centre for. Hells bells, I didn’t know if you just left mini mountains of manure in time out, it turned into liquid gold.

By now the premium real estate sign at the gate had popped off its frame, only one thing to do; make an attractive HP arrangement to prop it up. Pushing the thought that it may have been the neighbour who’d caved in and bought my four sacks to tidy up le grand entrance. Never.

We’re a sell sell situation. Luxury poo, luxury real estate. I wondered for a moment about putting my prices up but didn’t want to get done by Fair Gate Trading or a Consumers R Us watchdog.

Talking of advertising gimmicks, initially I’d wanted to call my manure, ‘Witchie Poo’. I always like to be original. Plus there is a lot of equine compost roadside where I live which catchy nomenclature like, ‘posh pony plops’ etc. However, I thought the addition of the word, WITCH might confuse my potential green fingered customers. 

Plus I didn’t want the 46 cats that live at the end of our road, opposite the Cat Rescue lady’s house (another story entirely) to worry there was a real life sorceress boiling up her cauldron nearby. Nor did I want to frighten the young children next door (well only for a moment).

Now that I’m a professional photographer. My rep will help their rep and so on and so forth. Kidding kidding. I’m not really a pro. Although I have just banked a cheque for a photo sold to a glossy magazine. (See October issue of North & South). And professional does mean: ‘taking part in an activity...as a means of livelihood.’  

Well it all adds up. Lively hood aside.

Lastly, for any gardeners not converted to the benefits of adding HP to their soil, check out the size of this baby:

I’m am now so enraptured with the benefits of this, fat-worm-filled humus-rich grass waste product I am currently curing a 100% PURE no dig potatoe and kumara patch. 

Oh yes. Watch this space!

Horses for Courses

    *

Lately I’ve been wondering if the ‘truth’ I’ve been recalling in my weekly blog-posts stands up to my ‘stranger than fiction’ testament? Then Lynda Hallinan, Sunday Magazine columnist (one of my favourites), confessed a couple of weekends ago that her husband thinks she sounds like a horse when she pees. And not in a, you could win a red ribbon on show day way, but in a you should put paper in the bowl beforehand way. I was impressed by her ability and by her confidence and willingness to share.

Because sometimes when writing this blog I deliberate for far too long over content that is strange but may or may not be suitable.  Like this…

The other night when I woke at 2.18am (for a pee) I looked out the window to check on a nearby ancient willow tree. Only because this still-standing-but-mainly-dead tree had been smoldering on and off for 36 hours, thanks to the errant flames of a nearby garden fire. Were my half-awake eyes playing tricks on me? Was that a gaggle of hobbits roasting a possum over yonder? Or was the tree in question cheerily aglow in the pitch blackness?

I looked again then nudged my husband. ‘Your tree is glowing. RED.’

It did cross my mind at that point whether I should wake the volunteer fire brigade as well, due to the proximity of this burning tree to our large transformer box. The one with a sign on it which reads, DANGER 20,000 volts DO NOT DIG. But I snuggled back under the duvet as my personal fire fighter stepped out into the night. The outside temperature was cruising around minus 5 degrees Celsius so the hose was frozen solid.

What’s a man to do to get the job done and back to bed? Well this is where being able to pee like an actual horse, not just sound like one, comes in mighty handy.

Talking of horses, recently one of my geldings had not been able to pee like a horse. His sad efforts were more akin to a small boy sitting on the potty. Something was up with his retractable waterworks. Up being the operative word, because his penis wouldn’t come down. All the way. And whatever was going on had caused the surrounding area to swell into almost stallion-like proportions. I felt for him.

To add insult to injury the horse in question is not hung like one. He has what my son charmingly calls a choad. Wiggling my little finger right now. Nuff said. And horse urine is very syrupy so if a horse can’t manage to hit the ground, cleanly, the result is a lot of dried black sticky stuff on legs and belly.

My ever helpful blacksmith arrived the next day.

‘Something’s up with his waterworks,’ I announced. ‘The vet said it’s the change in season. Grass and such. I don’t think so.’

He dropped the hoof he was working on and bent down to inspect. ‘Nah, you’ll need to get that cleaned out. The vet does it. Sedates them. They can get so gummed up they don’t even bother dropping them out to pee.’

‘Eek. What do they wash them with? Some kind of solution?’

‘They used to use Lux Flakes. You need a good equine vet.’

He gave me the number of someone out of town.  I dialed and explained my geldings predicament.

‘The vet isn’t due up your way for a couple of weeks. But you can try washing it yourself.’

Well needs must. So later that afternoon daughter 14 and I headed out armed with a half full bucket of warm soapy water, rubber gloves and an old tea towel.

‘Hold up his front leg,’ I instructed. ‘And if he moves around don’t let go.’

I started cleaning. And gagging. My tea towel came away blackened. My gelding didn’t budge. He must have known his public humiliation was a means to an end. Clean willy =  happy willy. Only my attempts were a bit halfcocked. It was like cleaning a snail tucked into a shell. I picked off black sticky bits and tried not to breath.

‘Why is it that I get all the penis jobs?’ I complained to my husband. ‘Cleaning them ETC ETC. I don’t even have one.’

I found an article on the internet, ‘Horse Sheath Cleaning. This should be done regularly to avoid smegma beans which can be cancerous’.  Seriously? That’s not in my, Care of Horse & Pony (1972).

I fed my gelding some windfall apples; he didn’t seem too perturbed.  Then he twisted his head back towards his tail and scratched his right fetlock (think ankle) with this teeth. I’m sure he would have scratched his willy if he could. Horses for courses I guess.

When the equine vet visited the swelling had subdued. But the poor boy still got the full monty. Glands check, thermometer, then sedation to make him relax himself. His eyes drooped, his front legs splayed. He swayed like an old drunk on his way home from the pub. I hoped he wouldn’t nose dive into the water trough. The vet assured me he wouldn’t go down as she donned her rubber gloves and waited.

‘Does he respond when you whistle?’

‘No,’ I laughed. But don’t because competitive riders train their horses to pee when they whistle.

Finally he relaxed. ‘It smells normal. Lots of smegma, but that’s normal too. Don’t believe what you read, it’s not cancerous. I can feel fat here,’ she said, pinching the folds of his sheath. ‘That’s caused the swelling.’

Post clean the gelding swooned, eyes shut, lower lip hanging, in the recovery pen.

We moved over to horse number two. He’d had me worried after having his tongue out for an inordinately amount of time the day before, like he’d just grown a cancerous tumour on the back of his throat. Turned out that was not the case. However he got the dentist gag, sedation and the battery-powered grinder for a bulbous tooth that had formed in front of a missing molar.

Gelding one looked on almost laughing now. Ha ha, I only got the willy-clean, you got the drill!

Thankfully everything was back to normal when the bill arrived. 250 bucks. I guess sometimes you have to pay, to pee like a horse. And that the truth can be stranger than fiction.

*Saskia Leek: Desk Collection. Go and see it at the Dunedin Art Gallery.

I Could Eat a Horse

I could eat a horse. Or could I?

It’s strange how the more you research a subject the more you remove yourself from it. Take the horsemeat scandal currently pig jumping in the face of scurrilous backstreet traders in Britain. 

Naturally I was on the animals side. I could no more take my beloved horse to the yard, put a stun-gun to his head and whip him up into a fresh equine tartare, than I could skin my hunting cat. Yet I have found myself surfing the net and chatting to my blacksmith on the subject of horsemeat for neigh-on half a day. I’ve been surprised.

**           In Japan you can buy horsemeat ice cream. Basashi. Not exactly my go-to after dinner treat. I’d prefer lumps of chocolate through my vanilla swirl. Apparently it’s very chewy, yet low fat, so guilt free.  Ewww.

**           Winston Churchill loved horses; his passionate petition helped post World War I horses return to Britain. ‘There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.’ He obviously wasn’t eyeing up a juicy flank steak to fill his belly when he said that. (Churchill also owned a number of cats, we would have got along.)

**           ”In Kazakhstan, there’is a dish sourced from almost every part of the animal, from the neck to the intestines and … (decided to edit that last morsel out). In Kyrgyzstan, horsemeat is traditionally consumed at big family gatherings.” Pony on a spit anyone?

**           "Horse and donkey meat was eaten in Britain, especially in Yorkshire the 1930s." Horse-shire pudding? 

**           One website said “…lack of historical taboo (in Asia) around this low fat protein has led to the development of a variety of delicious and innovative ways to consume Black Beauty and Co.” Pardon me. Eat Black Beauty? My first fictional horse love.

You see I was the seven year old who cantered everywhere, riding and BEING my imaginary pony. I imitated the perfect whinny and jumped everything in my path. Giddy-up Tonto.

My favourite TV show was, Dora at Follyfoot, an English drama set at a damp riding stable on a gloomy moor. The theme song still sends shivers up my spine. My bedroom walls were smothered in horsey collages. For birthdays and Christmases I was given books like, ‘For The love of Horses’ and ‘My Friend Flicka’. I scanned newspapers and magazines for anything to do with these adorable creatures. My scrapbook bulged with glossy show ponies and racehorse heads in black and white news print. If ‘Pony Mad Princess’ had been in print, I would have owned a boxed set.

It was my parent’s breakup that catapulted my equine love from the back garden to the corral. My stepfather-to-be flatted with the owner of a horse trekking business.  So my sister and I finally got to ride the real deal, not the 50cent plastic palomino outside Farmers. Tallyho and back to Singapore to visit Dad, and off to the Polo Club for riding lessons. Sweaty ponies with hogged mains, flicked at flies in the moist heat. We rode around a sawdust filled arena in jeans and Love-is t-shirts. Then returned home to Mum in New Zealand and begged for a pony. 

It didn’t take long until Wendy arrived - our very own grey mare. We took turns, or doubled, on the hills behind Havelock North and at pony club. Our riding improved, our desire deepened and we continued on our horsey way; gymkhanas, shows and the thunderous grounds of the hunting field. I didn’t wash my face the day I got blooded and kept my trophy, a hare’s ear, in my jewellery box beside my coral and pearl necklace for a decade. 

Thirty odd years later, I felt like I’d become a character in a Jilly Cooper novel when I donned jodhpurs, velvet hat and I rode my aforementioned horse. We have a combined age of 70 and hopefully will both go out in style, not to the knacker’s yard. 

NZ exports approximately 400,000kg of horsemeat a year. Russia and Belgium gobble up most of it. On the domestic market a steady trade in pet grade horsemeat is sold at the Mangere market, mainly to Tongans to make their traditional dish, Lo’ihosi. Horseflesh cooked up with coconut milk and onions for hours so it ends up tasting like, well, sweet and delicate apparently.

I doubt many kids in South Auckland are seen cantering about with imaginary riding crops whipping themselves over box hedges; then patting their proud and snorting mounts.  At $50 an 18kg box, horsemeat makes a super-value-meat-pack for any family, if you’re happy to eat it. 

Over the centuries, countries under siege or post war, whose populations were so hungry they could eat a horse, did. When working class Parisians couldn’t afford pork or beef, France overruled a 732 Papal ban and the first horse butchers appeared in 1866. They remained popular for two centuries.

Nowadays, the ‘Chevaline’, dotted among boutiques on the streets of Paris I visited as a teenager, have all but disappeared. It seems young Parisians are as squeamish as most of us, preferring chicken kebabs over pan fried heart of horse. 

They shoot horses don’t they? Yes, but not the greys. They are full of malignant melanomas. Horse cancer. ‘It’s disgusting.  Black spots all through them.’  So my blacksmith told me. He also said he wouldn’t eat horsemeat after witnessing what it did to the hounds when they ate it. ‘Weird stuff, it makes your hands oily.’

Enough. I led my freshly shod horse away and put him out to graze.

Through necessity or cultural preference humans eat horse and until the recent lasagne-gate the subject was a bit like male chickens; there but conveniently forgotten. We should be thankful that those meat slurry traders have been busted. Tighter regulations can only work in favour for man and beast. 

Thank heavens for summers abundance of courgettes. Ratatouille anyone?