A Good Night's Sleep & Farming Mad!

G’day everyone!

Slept like a log. Originally wrote: slept like a baby, then realised the flood of wisecracks it would invite from certain friends in the southern hemisphere. Anyway, sleep I did. Bear in mind that where we live could be likened to living underground in Coober Pedy; kind of far out – no noise. I mean zero decibels unless an owl cracks off with a hoot for the night-shift. That was the problem; the old brain cells were screaming out for a bit of good ol’ street noise – gets too quiet out here and the well used ‘silence is deafening’ truism sometimes springs to life.

Farmer harvested his silage yesterday – late on – eleven o’clock at night the machines moved in. War of the Worlds had surrounded our little house. Wife threw back the curtains for a glimpse of alien tripods and Tom Cruise; realised her hopes were fanciful and snuggled back down. But the noise went on; engines roared, cutters hissed and clattered, spotlights glared through our curtains and our three, normally well-behaved pooches threatened to eat the back door. I waited for that red-and-green-eye-on-a-hose-thing to come slithering up the stairs; guess it heard the dogs and thought better of it. Anyway, for whatever scientific reasons, we slept through it all and awoke refreshed, just in time to watch the tractors and tripods rumble off into the sunrise...

*

A Farming We Will Go! (pulled this from the archives; needed a break from the norm.)

Living in the same house for ten years made the rut that I first fell into just that little bit deeper; my own, slothful haven – or at least I thought so before my wife announced over dinner that now was the time to start our own business.

‘Doing what, exactly?’ I asked and wished I hadn’t.

‘Worm farming!’ Victoria exulted, as though the reasons for our being on this earth had suddenly been revealed by a celestial plaque between the sauce bottles. ‘I’ve been doing some research on the Internet. Worm farming is big business in America.’ The kids stopped eating and pleaded with their eyes for me not to leave them alone with their mother.

‘Worm farming?’

‘That’s what I said, darling,’ and wiggled her little finger in my direction. ‘Remember? Those little wriggly things that fishermen use?’

I was being got at. My normal, lovely, sensible wife had turned into a Sybil Fawlty sound-alike.

‘What about the fence?’ I asked her; stone faced – now prepared to do battle in order to preserve my boring little lifestyle. ‘The fence is broken. The worms would make a break for next door’s garden?’

‘I’m trying to be serious,’ Victoria crackled at me, but already the kids were grinning me on to greater things.

‘These worms,’ I asked. ‘Where will they live?’

‘You’re doing it again,’ Victoria glowered at me. ‘They’re called worm farms,’ she went on through gritted teeth, ‘we could keep them in your shed to start with and expand from there.’

‘So I wouldn’t have to round them up and herd them back to a sort of worm corral every night?’

The kids cracked up.

‘And what about rustlers?’ I was pushing my luck, and from the look on Victoria’s face my John Wayne voice-over wasn’t being appreciated. ‘They’d have our herd across the Rio Grande and into Shropshire before sun-up.’

This is the time when everyone looks at each other and lapses into silence, a sort of wait-and-see mode, but what goes up must come down and it did. With a bang.

‘You’re a puerile twit!’ snorted Victoria and conjured up her best ‘I hate you stare’ before storming out of the room.

It was time to apologise and I did, with a week of flowers and my solemn promise to support her worm empire. So for days after our business rift we searched for web sites selling all things wormy. Statistics were read and discussed for hours on end and only once did I get into trouble when I suggested we market mini lassoes and branding irons. By this time, wormy information was coming at us from every quarter. Things like; ‘Send just $14000 for your worm farm business plan’ and a myriad of book offers from places abroad like ‘The Square D Worm Ranch’ and ‘How-to’ books on everything from worm ailments to increasing their libido. All somewhat confusing when the little darlings seem to manage alright in our garden without strategically laid out feeding plans and Anne Summers catalogues.

However, we soldiered on, my wife with a growing sense of excitement and me with my own cynical barrage of smiles and ‘yes dears’. Two weeks into empire-building and our first self-contained, state of the art worm farm arrived from America.

Victoria was enraptured. Her multi-storey stack of trays was quickly installed in my shed and filled with some composty looking stuff. Obviously well pleased with her first wormy experience, she busied herself with our new inmates, clucking like a delighted mother hen over her brood of wriggling hatchlings.

‘I’m sure they’ll be happy in their new home?’ said Victoria, but with some trepidation, and my offer of throwing them a housewarming party went down like a lead submarine. So once again I attempted to save the day by drawing on my own, branded type of silly humour and as usual, failed miserably.

‘What about some country and western music? A bit of good old American line dancing might stop them getting homesick?’ I went on with the jibe, making the most of those remaining seconds to offload my last week’s pile of pent-up humour. ‘And the Fourth of July will be here soon so what about turkey dinner and fireworks for your little critters down there in good old dirt’s-ville!’

I think she heard the first bit and ignored the rest; her usual need to choke the life out of me had been beaten into second place by this newfound interest in worm world. My rights to the sanctuary of the garden shed had been usurped.

*

Sons of Africa; an extract:

... Before dawn, the king himself summoned Mhlangana to the royal enclosure. Fresh from the sleeping mat, Mhlangana stood naked to the warmth of a small fire whilst his woman, Imbali, gazed upon him with soft eyes. With fat from the hump of a bull Eland, she lightly anointed his body; so that now he glowed with that same, deep patina of black granite.

‘You are indeed the king’s man. Should another woman look upon you with lover’s eyes I shall be forced to cut out her heart.’

 He clothed quickly and in the full regalia of his high standing. To each muscled arm were tied medals of his valour; tails from the whitest of royal cattle, culled in their prime – each one given to the Induna by the king himself. At his waist hung a kilt of soft hide, adorned with the black-ringed tails of speckled civet and for the length of a man’s arm above his head, a plume of pure white ostrich feathers appeared to Imbali as a crown of winter mist above the sacred hills of Matobo.

 Against his skin, hers was the lighter; more subtle of colour – that of turned earth to warm rain. Barely reaching his chest with her forehead, she stared up at the king’s favourite and marvelled at the face above her, black as the night itself, god-like in the firelight; throughout her entire life she had never seen another more beautiful.

‘Were it not the king who summoned you, Lord. I would please you until every glimmer of strength was drawn from my body. One night was not enough,’ she whispered, and let her hands wander beneath the skirt at his waist. She felt his passion rise, cobra-headed from the soft caress of her fingertips and she teased him lightly.

‘He still hungers, Lord.’  Imbali forced herself free of Mhlangana’s arm. ‘Go now, my husband, do not stay for another moment or not even the strength of a hundred great elephants will be enough to take you from me...’

*