Town and Country

The call came while I was at lunch: "Your bees are swarming and they're at the neighbour's".

Could do better. It's a comment that blighted my report card all the years I was at school, even on one rare occasion when I topped the class. And I still feel the burden almost half a century on.

Eggs in the hedge, in the woolshed, in the mint patch; eggs on a shelf in the garage, down the driveway, in the coppice: we're sick of our hens running wild and laying everywhere but the henhouse.

What were you doing before breakfast on Wednesday? Maybe you were making your lunch, or listening to the news before getting up. Maybe you were reading the paper. Me? I was up in the paddock with a grubber, directing a creek back into its channel.

You'd think I would have sorted things out by now, but every spring it happens - our lambs arrive at the same time as the daffodils, and the only place with lovely rich grass for them is the daffodil paddock at the front of the house. So my beautiful display gets nibbled by lambs and squashed flat by ewes plonking down for a rest.

Well, they finally got me. After a year and a-half of poking around in bee hives, moving them, stealing honey from them, taking them apart box by box to check every frame for disease and generally interfering with the bees, I have finally had a bee sting.

Money talks, they say, but all mine has said lately is goodbye.

Winter must be on the way out - I've been feeling the urge to spring-clean.

When Shrek the famous merino visited an iceberg off the Otago coast, he was fitted with little crampons so he didn't lose his footing in the slippery conditions.

I wish I was a gardener; a proper gardener, with neat raised beds bursting with winter greens - silverbeet, spinach, cabbage, cavolo nero, bok choy - and carrots and parsnips just waiting to be pulled up. Broad beans would be well on their way to producing a spring crop.

I knew things on the feed front would be tight this winter when Mr Reliable, the gentleman who sells me the bulk of my hay each year, told me he had none to spare.

I was riding an elephant in Malaysia when it occurred to me that I hadn't filed (or even written) my first June column, and it was too late to do anything about it. I had no choice but to carry on enjoying my holiday.

Busy as a bee; a hive of activity, making a beeline. Humans and bees have lived together for so long that the habits of the bees are part of our language.

Otago Harbour shone like glass in the autumn sun. There was not a breath of wind, which was bad luck for yachties and windsurfers but great for the kayakers, rowers and dragon-boat paddlers who were making the most of the glorious weather.

Headlights cut through the early morning gloom; a car crunches to a stop in the loose gravel at the top of our drive.

Sometimes things go perfectly right.

It's sometimes hard to get started on a column, but I've never found it harder than today.

I love to think of myself as self-sufficient, and I enjoy the sort of practical tasks there isn't much call for in town: clearing ditches, unblocking drains, that sort of thing.

"Slow down, you move too fast ..." sang Simon and Garfunkel cheerily.