No snow today, have a reminiscence instead

Last night, the bypass ground to a halt as 60 bewildered sheep took themselves for a little adventure on the tarmac. Presumably they were worried that everyone had wound themselves up waiting for snow and needed some kind of cathartic delay to justify all the preparation. I was reminded of an evening when I was very young when one of the local farmers’ cows escaped. Rather than contenting themselves with blocking the main road through the village, they decided on a sort of divide and conquer strategy, splintering into little groups and spreading themselves over as wide an area as possible.

The lovely warm summer evening was soon punctuated with startled squawks as people sitting in their gardens suddenly found themselves being peered at and taste-tested by curious heifers (presumably wondering whether these big squishy saltlicks were worth all the effort). The daughter of the couple living in the big house at the bottom of the hill had been married that day, and the reception was in full swing when three large black and white bovines clattered down the back garden steps and joined the revelry. Not that this fazed the father of the bride in any way. The Major would have succumbed to a breakdown if they’d managed to get onto the cricket pitch but the parlour carpet mattered not a jot. My parents were watching a programme about aliens when three large black and white faces appeared at the sitting room window, and a neighbour who had been watching the same programme with her 9 year old son abandoned him in the garden when a similar face poked itself through the hedge in the middle of a stargazing discussion about whether aliens really existed.

He didn’t let her forget about that for a while.

The miscreants were gradually rounded up, the fence mended, and the village settled back into its normal routine, which was generally a 50/50 split between stomping around in shit-encrusted wellies arguing over vegetable varieties and lawnmowing techniques, and picking carefully along footpaths in Hunter wellies complaining that the farmers hadn’t planted anything to look at and all the fields were just boring muddy brown. Oh, and the odd jumble sale.

I miss jumble sales.