The chainsaw massacre birthday surprise that didn’t get my goat
The down side of his impending arrival was having to corral the two cats into a locked room to prevent them encountering the golden retriever who travels with him.
After the last time they met the dog, Scruffy had stress incontinence for a week and Dino doubled the mouse supply, apparently in an effort to prove himself too valuable to be forced to share living space, even briefly, with what he clearly thought was a particularly vicious polar bear.
The dog means the cats no harm, any more than he means me harm when he greets me with wild enthusiasm, knocks me down, grabs me by the arm and tries to drag me across the garden like an outsize dead duck to offer his owner. It’s just the joie de vivre of late puppy-hood, but that’s a concept difficult to explain to cats.
Let’s be honest.
Trying to explain anything to a cat is a waste of time, and it’s really mortifying when they yawn in the middle.
Not knowing much about dogs, I can’t tell whether it’s a golden retriever trait to love dirt, particularly if it’s wet, slimy dirt, or just a characteristic of this specific dog.
And because I was cat-corralling I forgot to put a heavy barrier over the pond. The pond is half the size of the dog, but he’s convinced it’s his bath, so he didn’t even pause to knock me down on arrival. He took off straight into it, emerging in tar-baby mode just as the man in my life came back with my car, newly washed and waxed as a birthday treat for me. The car, I mean.
The dog bounded up to greet him and did that committed wet-dog shake, covering him and the car in a fine spotting of black slime and drawing from him a full-throated yell of profane rage.
“Always a mistake to shout at him,” the dog’s owner said censoriously. “It just frightens him and he doesn’t understand why you’re mad at him.”
The dog, which devotes itself in a sporadic way to proving its owner is up there with the Dog Whisperer in canine-related wisdom, retreated back to the pond, huge sad eyes reproving the shouter. When it emerged again, it shunned him and went around the car as far away from him as possible to do its shake, which at least ensured the muddy polka dot pattern matched on both sides of the vehicle.
“I brought you a birthday present,” the dog’s owner told me. “It’s not wrapped.”
This wasn’t a surprise. In my experience, real men don’t wrap presents. If forced, they do it so badly, a nearby woman will take it from them and do it right.
“Now, this present,” he went on, “this present is either the most inspired best present you’ve ever been given. Or it’s a total disaster.”
A goat, I thought. Or a chicken. I’m going through this back-to-nature phase, although, in fairness, since I was never at one with nature in the first place, it’s more of a first-time visit.
I have this urge to re-shape my life along the lines of a book I read 100 years ago called The Children of the New Forest. All I can remember of it is that a bunch of kids, for reasons that escape me, end up creating a farm, harvesting their own eggs, using animal manure as fertiliser and generally being organic long before organic was cool. I’ve taken to capturing rainwater in barrels and compost in bins and when the dog, on its visits, deposits a Guinness Book of Records offering on the lawn, I dig it into the flower-bed and feel very virtuous.
For some time now, I’ve been worrying about the use of a power-mower and considering a wildlife approach to keeping the grass from growing shoulder-high.
Someone said chickens were good, but I’d have to built a Fort Knox coop for them to keep Scruffy out, which would limit their lawn-mowing mobility, so I considered goats for a while.
I went off them though, as having abandoned the electric drier and gone back to a clothesline, I’d heard that goats are indiscriminate in their tastes and would eat jeans and shirts with as much enthusiasm as they’d approach vegetation. My wardrobe is sparse enough without a goat viewing it as pudding.
“You don’t have to pretend to like this present,” the dog owner went on. “It can be returned.”
THAT worried me even more. I didn’t want to be responsible for a youthful goat experiencing peer pressure from other kids in the pet shop (if that’s where you get goats) calling him a reject if I didn’t keep him. Or her.
“Here it is,” he said, lifting two huge red and black boxes out of the back of his car, to my relief, because I didn’t figure goats or chickens come in cartons and I was right.
The gift – or gifts – consisted of a chainsaw and an alligator-jawed log-cutter.
Now you might not think that a columnist with the Irish Examiner, hitting a point of grievously advanced age, would want to be able to assault trees and planks nicked from skips, but you’d be wrong. I was thrilled.
Would he assemble them? Of course he would. Out came that little booklet with a drawing of the machine speared all around by straight arrows leading to numbers describing its various elements. Out came the machine itself. Out came the batteries.
I stood in silence, assuaging my own impending guilt by telling myself they’ll soon be powered by electricity from a wind turbine and waiting for one of the three sentences which tend to get uttered by men assembling machines.
The first is “These bloody instructions don’t match at all. They’re just wrong.” (He didn’t say that.) The second is “Do we have any WD40?” Sometimes, the variant on this is “Do we have any 3 in 1 oil?” He did say that. I found some.
The third is “Do we have an Alan key?” (This may more properly be called an Allen key, but I’m always too exhausted after the search to do a spell check.) A bunch of L-shaped yokes was eventually found. At precisely the same moment, he discovered a single L-shaped yoke thoughtfully embedded in the new machine: clearly Alan, THE key.
Having plugged batteries into mains, given the safety lecture and hosed down the dog, he left.
I spent yesterday in the wasteland beside our house, biting into dead trees with my alligator jaws, humming that Monty Python song, “I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK.”
Today, I have a wondrous fuel pile. I also have to go to the doctor for a tetanus shot, but the injury is tiny. Really. I’m a lumberjack and I’m nearly OK.
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