Aussie Beasts

Aussie Beasts


We are Betcherrigah. Yellow and green we are.
Flocks in the trees we are, you know us well.
We’ll copy anything, whether you laugh or sing.
What Aussie beast are we – can you tell?

*

I am the Lillipilli, gentle and shy,
I don’t make a fuss, and I never ask why.
My head is fluffy and I hold it high –
I’m an Australian, but what am I?

*

I am the Kookaburra, I eat snakes.
I don’t like trifle and I don’t like cakes.
With my sharp nose and my laughing cry,
what kind of Australian beast am I?

*

He is the Boggi, scaly and rough.
He'll flash his tongue to show he's tough.
Don’t pick him up, he'll bite and hiss!
What kind of Aussie beast is this?

*
I am the Bandicoot, sometimes in stripes.
I have a long nose that nobody wipes.
My favourite call is a trumpeting sound
and I’ll eat just anything I find left around.

*

He’s a Koala, who looks sweet and dumb.
He eats the fresh leaves of a species of gum,
he has big ears and an opposable thumb,
but his small eyes tell you he’s nobody’s chum.

*

This is Echidna, with spikes on her back
and a pointy snout for a termite attack.
Her babies drink milk though they hatched out of eggs
and her husband’s penis has got four legs.

*

We are a singular creature, the Platypus
and Platypod-es is the plural of us.
We swim underwater and wear a soft beak
that makes it extremely hard to speak.

*

She is the Kangaroo, rusty and red.
She has a pocket for her baby’s bed.
She can jump on enormous feet –
She's the boundingest Aussie beast you’ll meet.

Hot and Cold

Greenhouse effect? What greenhouse effect?

It was peeing down with rain and after the monstrous heat of the summer of 95 it was almost a relief to feel cold while I was loading light lambs to go to auction. This time the lambs didn't have to sit panting with heat and travelled comfortably in the horsebox - though after listening to them bleating all night for their mothers I supposed there was still plenty of stress in the simple fact of the separation.

After the auction I smiled to see a farmer in full waterproof kit striding through the rain back to his Land Rover, bearing a brand new hay rake. They say farmers are pessimists, but things like that make me wonder! I once met a neighbour in a narrow road and as is customary we both rolled down our vehicle windows to pass the time of day and comment on the weather.

"I've just been to buy some waterproofs ready for haytime," he announced.

Now, the animals know enough about weather to put Bill Giles / Sue Charlton / Bill Kettley to shame. Fell ponies trek determinedly to the lee side of the mountain when snow is imminent. Or if they expect to be fed hay near the farm during a snowy spell, they will wait Cassandra-like at the fell gate. When the thaw is due, they take themselves off... and then the snow melts.

At the other end of the temperature scale, Chris, a large, fit and extremely physical neighbour given to shepherding in nothing more than shorts and boots during the summer, announced as I passed one steamy afternoon, "Reckon Ah need to tek a skin off."

But there are also more daft sayings about weather than you can shake a stick at. Cause is confused with effect without any attempt at logic. In early spring when the fells are still streaked with snow, it's quite common to hear Cumbrian shoppers remark, shaking knowing heads, "It won't get warmer till them snow patches go." No - the other way about - surely?

"Oak before ash, Only a splash; Ash before oak, In for a soak." So goes the proverb. Must be written in order to rhyme. I've never seen ash trees leaf before oaks. But I have seen summers with both extremes of wetness and dryness!

Likewise, the pundits who have nothing better to do than pester the local paper with repetitive letters announce every September that the heavy crop of hawthorn / rosehip / rowan berries must surely presage a hard winter. I can only say that I must live in a different country. Our hawthorns and rowans flowered profusely in 96 after 95's hot summer ripened their branches, and as a result they berried tremendously in autumn. And the winter of 96/97 was not bad enough to prevent me going to work over Grayrigg Hause with a summit height of around 1300 feet.

Likewise people write to comment on the early return of the robins in their garden, predicting a bad winter again. What the robins would say I do not know. Does anyone think that they all leave England in spring? Ours have been known to nest in the cupped palm of a rhubarb leaf. One summer it was quite normal for them to mug you when you went innocently seeking something for a totally vegetarian pudding. Did that mean winter would be here all year round? I don't think so. Their presence in my garden means that, in summer, robins among the dense foliage have got better things to do than their highly conspicuous bare-branch winter activity of telling all other robins to get the hell out of their territory. So, you don't see them much in summer, but suddenly when the leaves are down they become conspicuous once more. QED.

A steadying thought for St Valentine's Day

She snuggles up to him under the duvet.

"Happiness," she sighs, "is a warm hairy husband."

"Happiness," he replies, "is a chilly wife on her OWN side of the bed."

Football league

I can live without football. Hush! I do not need a weekly fix of 22 men in shorts kicking hell out of a ball. I try to make a point, though, of watching televised footie on Saturday nights because my husband looks forward to it so much. I fire up the laptop and sit checking my e mails, while he snorts and gasps and exclaims, and Messrs Lineker, Hansen, Lawrenson, Shearer et al dissect the finer points of each game. He doesn’t have a favourite team as such, so this is not the agony it might be with a certain other family of my acquaintance, whose rabid allegiance it is not wise to question.

I have detected some partisanship in my mate’s behaviours though. My more mundane tasks around the house have often been lightened by mentally categorising them. Here’s what I’ve constructed so far.

International: We don’t think a lot of the England team, but we want it to win if playing a foreign one.

National: Leagues: We’ll support any northern team that’s playing a southern team. If both teams are northern we’re truly impartial. If both teams are southern, ditto, unless there’s someone obnoxious managing one team, when we’ll hope the other wins. From that point of view, it used to be the highlight of the evening if Chelsea got stuffed and “mean, moody and magnificent” Mourinho had one of his tantrums. I miss him.

National: F A Cup competitions: We’d like to see any small lowly club beat any big one.

Thinking about all this has made me realise that I have other, smaller, fragmentations in my own support. Raised as an Everton fan, I really want to see the “Toffees” win a Merseyside Derby / Premiership / F A Cup, but I have to admit that one of the best things David Moyes did was to sell Rooney to Manchester United. My brother, who has a season ticket to Goodison Park, would never admit that any other club could offer any excitement, but Liverpool’s Gerrard sprinting through the midfield or taking a penalty does it for me just as much as EFC’s Johnson heading for goal or Man U’s Ronaldo dancing contemptuously with the ball round the opposing defence. Like I said, I’m impartial.

A few niggles. One is the group hug that seems mandatory after scoring a goal. It reminds me of my Dad’s school playground game, “Weak Horse” where boys all jumped on top of someone in the hope that he’d collapse. Why can’t they all celebrate with multiple handsprings? perhaps in formation? A second is the sight of fit male footballers (I excuse goalkeepers) wearing gloves, something we schoolgirls were never allowed to do when playing netball, even in freezing rain. Televised games can be too in-your-face: complete turnoffs for me are the managers’ inability to chew gum with their mouths shut, and the frequency with which players spit during a game.

The number one niggle, though, is the quantity of foreign players in the top English teams. At least Liverpool and Everton are captained by self-controlled, gloveless, proper Northern lads.

It’s Everton, though, that has the motto to end all mottoes: Nil Satis Nisi Optimum. Nothing is good enough unless it is the best.

Darts as a sport?

I heard an interview with a high ranked darts player on the radio. I have to say the interviewer did a good job of finding questions to ask, but the replies were possibly the most boring I’ve heard this year – the player hardly able to expand any of his monosyllabic replies. The nearest he got to any kind of reasoning was to say that darts was a sport, and if anyone thought it wasn’t, they had to take into account “all that walking”.

From the oche to the board to collect the darts after each turn. Wow. That’s 7 feet 9¼ inches. AND BACK.

That must be what keeps darts players so lithe and fit, is it?

Thought for the New Year

An ex-actress friend, newly into writing, complained to me yesterday: “it just is not in vogue to have poems that have a regular metre or rhyme.”

I think she’s right - it is a vogue. Depends where you read, I suppose; magazines will sometimes publish the most godawful crap if it more or less scans and happens to have rhymes. It also has to have a commonplace, even saccharine message. (I have submitted poetry that rhymed, scanned, and had a sharp message and had it rejected with a preprinted slip saying that it needed to rhyme, scan and have a message. Duh? But that’s another story and probably The People’s Friend would reject that too.)

“Serious” poetry appears to have lost the skill of writing meaningful, rhymed, metrical work. I don’t include rap because it only (sort-of) works if it has a synthetic beat behind it, and like most doggerel it dies horribly if asked to stand alone. Somewhere along the line, “meaningful” has branched off into free verse, leaving rhyme and metre in the children's section. And that's a shame. It's like creating jewellery, but restricting your materials to chromium and rhinestones. Why not accept all the tools that language has to offer?

Station snapshots

I live near a motorway service station, one that has – contrary to expectation – an excellent reputation and the framed certificates to prove it. We local yokels take it for granted that it will be open 24/7 apart from Christmas and New Year, and it does offer bizarre sights that add to the interest of our peaceful, cheery (insert platitudinous adjectives here) rural lives.

A trip across the petrol forecourt, specially on weekend evenings, is notable for scantily clad personages (I really can’t call them Ladies) wearing pink bunny rabbit ears, fishnet tights and cottonpuff tails as they stagger from coach to loos and back. My daughter tells me they are probably en route to Blackpool or Morecambe for a hen party. I feel sorry for poor Morecambe, but at least they won’t be staying here to scream their drunken obscenities – and that’s just on the outward journey.

One evening last year, when I was driving peacefully homeward past the service exit, I encountered a kilted bag-piper heel-and-toeing along the grass verge with his pipe and drones in full voice. Once I’d shaken myself and decided it wasn’t an apparition, I approved his choice of rehearsal room – the open air. Mind, it was possible that his fellow passengers (or his employers) had forced him to relocate. Confinement indoors with a set crying come-to-battle is a form of torture that even the deafened disco generation might find it hard to tolerate. Bagpipes are outdoor instruments. (Or should that be, The bagpipe IS an outdoor instrument? Someone please tell me.)

The arrival of winter was marked again this year by the lady and gent who walk a team of huskies. They always appear to be northbound, but I could just have missed their return trips. Snow sometimes follows, though I wouldn’t dare to assert that there is any connection. And I’ve never seen them wearing anything red or furry.