Children grow from little lambs to teenage terrors

THERE is a line, invisible as electricity but just as shocking, that your kids will one day step over, when they move from being children to something far, far worse. Teenagers. It can happen in an instant, when a single sentence crystallises the transition, a lone throwaway remark telescopes the whole of childhood from the present to the past in the blink of an eye. Or in this case, the shake of a lamb’s tail. And that single, electrocuting sentence? “Lambs are crap.”

Let me repeat that: Lambs. Are. Crap. Have you ever heard such a monstrous statement? And yet this is what you are being told, repeatedly, as you stand surrounded by newborn lambs baaaaing and wobbling to their feet, so adorable that you feel like you may dissolve on the farmyard floor in a pool of warm goo. This is how you, the adult, feels when you are in the presence of all these newborn lambs, with their melty eyes and knobbly knees.

Yes, it’s lambing season. At a sheep farm, for a fiver, you can hand feed the mummy sheep bags of sheep treats – hopefully not made of ground-up fellow sheep – and cuddle the lambs, who lick your hands and make baaaa noises. You go every spring, and every spring leave all misty-eyed and covered in lanolin.

Until now. Now, today, lambs are crap. This is the new reality. Perhaps it’s your own fault for encouraging your kids to bring their friends on the annual lamb pilgrimage. Especially Daughter’s Boyfriend, who is 15 and from the metropolis, and has never actually seen a lamb before, other than on his dinner plate. There he is, moodily sitting on a hay bale, ignoring the lambs and blocking out the baaaa-ing with Eminem. He and Daughter are sharing his headphones, nodding their heads to the beat, jaws jutting.

On an adjoining hay bale sits the ten year old and his best friend, also sharing a pair of headphones. Skrillex. Their heads also nod, their jaws also jut. The only people showing any enthusiasm for this ovine idyll are yourself and your middle-aged boyfriend, who, with a combined age of 92, are skipping joyfully from pen to pen, cooing, awwwing, and taking photographs. On the hay bales, there is a mass teen and pre-teen sulk. “Come on, look at how cute these little lambs are,” you say, trying not to sound like you’re begging.

The teenagers stare at you pityingly, and then it happens. Out of Daughter’s mouth comes the short, crushing, end-of-an-era declaration: “Mum. Lambs are crap.” Without missing a beat, the ten year old follows with, “Yeah. Lambs are crap. Can we go now?”, as the teenage boyfriend says languidly, “Yeah, man. Lambs are crap. And there’s no wifi”.