The real ewe? Retromingent cows have shorn me of all nature illusions

EVERY week, another report surfaces which establishes that the more time you spend on Facebook or Twitter, the more likely you are to be an unhappy, nail-biting paranoid.

The odd thing about Facebook and Twitter addicts is that they know precisely how unhappy it makes them, but they can’t kick the habit and have a contempt for those who avoid social media which borders on the contempt demonstrated during the Industrial Revolution for the troglodytes who threw their clogs into the new machines.

Those of us who steer clear of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook for other than anonymous viewing purposes are demonstrably healthier and happier than those who get trolled for their mistakes, opinions, clothing, or weight gain, but the addicts still want us to have their habit.

Which is not to say that those of us who eschew social media don’t have our own pointless, time consuming, productivity- damaging, internet addictions. One of mine is checking breaking news sites every hour.

I find doing it that often gives me a comforting illusion that nothing much is happening in the world, whereas if I have to leave an interval of as much as eight hours, it’s positively Yeatsian how utterly everything has changed when I go back to check. It’s akin to living with someone for 30 years: Constant presence means you don’t really notice them developing the odd grey hair and wrinkle, whereas if you were to meet them only at 30-year intervals, the contrast, at each meeting, would be shocking. They would look so suddenly old, you might think they were their own mother, or father, as the case may be.

News junkies are at the respectable end of the addiction continuum, so there’s no shame in admitting to regular checks on emerging stories. It’s what one does thereafter that can bring shame on the whole house.

I would not want anybody to know about this, but once I’ve checked up on what needs worrying about, down the page I go until I find a video story about a cute animal. Like the cat that made bits of the dog that was attacking the cat’s toddler owner. Or the dog that made the baby cry and felt so guilty as a result that it brought every toy in the house to the baby to make it feel better. Or the adorable spaniel bottle-feeding the orphaned lamb. I try not to send these clips on to other people, because I don’t want to be thought of as the kind of half-wit who sends friends links to cute animal videos.

If I’m being honest, though, I have to admit that I might have lapsed in the last week in relation to the elephant born in the zoo, because it looked so adorable, cuddling in among its mother’s tree-trunk legs. I did send that to a few friends. But only a few. Maybe a couple of dozen.

I suspect I belong in a sub-group — an inferior sub-group — of humanity, made up of folks who love internet animals but don’t actually know the first thing about the real live version. It was not until my middle years, for example, that I discovered that cows pee backwards, and when one did it, in the middle of a shoot I was directing, I wrecked a perfectly good filmed sequence by shrieking aloud about it.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Terry, everybody knows cows are retromingent,” the man in my life said tersely, me having gratuitously disrupted his piece to camera. I didn’t know which to admire most, the cow for peeing backwards, or the man in my life for knowing a word like retromingent.

I memorised it on the spot and have cherished it ever since. It’s never come in useful so far though. It’s amazing how few conversations permit the easy insertion of ‘retromingent’. Maybe I move in the wrong circles.

The animal-ignorance thing surfaced again a couple of weeks ago, when the same man and I were gazing upon an idyllic stretch of land in the Mourne Mountains. The side of the nearest hill was dotted with animals, which, roughly equidistant from each other, had lain down upon the greensward. These animals had a greeny-cream cast to their skin, were fat around the middle and (as I could see when any one of them stood up), were nothing to write home about in the looks department, although not quite as ugly as pigs.

“What are they?” I asked himself. “What are what?” he asked, his journalistic instincts never letting him make assumptions.

“Them,” I said, gesturing magisterially.

“Those animals?” he asked, taking, in my view, the fact-checking thing a little far.

“Yes,” I said impatiently. “Those animals.” “They’re sheep,” he said, looking at me with an expression that mixed kindness with diagnosis. “How could they be sheep?” I asked. “Sheep are —” and I sketched curly clouds of wool in the air.

“These ones are shorn sheep,” he said, adding, like a man in a tongue-twisting contest, “They are sheep shortly after shearing.”

I couldn’t get over it. Whenever the lads on Today FM shave off their hair for that Shave or Dye cancer fundraiser, you don’t just see them with the towel around their necks and the shears going through their locks, you get up-close and pictorial with them afterwards, so their hairless heads are imprinted forever on your consciousness.

Because the post-shaving photographs are so memorable, even if you met them on the side of a hill the following day, you’d know they were Ray D’Arcy or Tony Fenton. Or — if the shaving radically changed their appearance, as it sometimes does — you would at least still be reasonably sure of the species to which they belong. Human, you would say to yourself. Persons with more head-skin than usual on display, but persons, no doubt about it.

FOR some reason, however, nobody ever sees the before- and-after photographs of sheep that have got on the wrong side of a shears: Just the before and during, with the pictures making the shearer look powerful and the sheep look like a weak eejit.

The sheep-shearer is seen readying the beast for its haircut by sitting it more or less on its tail, its little paws in the air, its little eyes filled with terror. If it’s a junior sheep, the fear it shows is of the unknown. If it is a ewe, (which I think is the term applying to a sheep that’s been around a bit) the fear derives from the certain knowledge that it is in the process of being mugged and having its good winter coat nicked. It’s all so unfair and unattractive, that I protested about it to the lawyer in the office who does a bit of sheep-farming on the side.

He said sheep have to be shorn otherwise they would get maggots. At this point I decided to stay away from nature and stick with the sanitised internet offering.