Friday, November 20, 2009

Very clever goats

Meanwhile, back in Romania, they have a Presidential election this coming Sunday.
If it was down to the number of posters, Mircea Geoana would win by a mile. But Alin assures me the present incumbent ( Basescu) will be the winner.
" You see, Mr. King, it's like this. If you are Coca Cola, you don't doing much advertising. But if you are Sighisoara Cola, then you must doing much advertising just to get little business."
I'm not 100% sure his argument is valid, but all the other candidates names end in "escu" .There are cases of mothers forcing their daughters into marriages with men just because their name ended in "escu". For some reason you are regarded as an important person. In fact, I was recently introduced as "Learescu" just to make the point...
The weather here is beautiful and warm - 17C today and the most brilliant blue sky. There is the odd wisp of smoke as the gloaming sets in, rising straight up, which is very picturesque.
This is the time of year when the ploughing has to be done so we spent most of today checking that the people doing it were in the right places. It's surprising how often our next door neighbours get their fields ploughed for free...
We went to the Mayor for a cup of coffee and ended up having special sausages made from goat and pig. I was slightly suspicious so we went to check on our goats to make sure it was only the sheep that the teethy wolves were eating. It looks as though the teethy wolves have been adding goats rather than subtracting them, as instead of 58 we now have 62 ( as far as I can calculate the absolute absolute maximum should be 56 and that's stretching it a bit), and all, I am assured, are pregnant. I find this a little hard to believe as it's only now that the billys are let lose on them, but we shall see, as Alin would say. We needed to build an additional shelter to house the new lot of kids, and this has been a major undertaking, with advice from everyone in the village as to exactly where it should be built.Also which way round. And how big, long, wide, high and of what. And what the party should be like when it is finished.
Whilst all this was going on the goat man , Dan and his two helpers had been quietly working away, and I was astonished to see a whole new building within 50 feet of the old one when I arrived there today.
I asked how much it had cost.
" Nothing," said Dan. Being Romania, this had not surprised me as much as it ought to have done.
It transpired the uprights and roof trusses had been donated by the forest man, in exchange for a goat and a pig. The roof was old metal sheets salvaged from cutting up a redundant water tank. The sides had been built using reclaimed block and bricks from various building sites round about. And of course the cement, sand nails etc. had simply appeared..
Now bearing in mind we don't actually have any pigs ( we ate ours this time last year), and it would mean we should only have 55 goats, and however you care to look at it most of the stuff was - how shall I put this delicately - stolen - I was a bit worried about the whole thing.
Dan assured me it was fine. Everyone who "donated" had been compensated. How? He had given them baby goats...and some sheep.
So my goat man steals sheep from my shepherd.
And the goats appear to have some form of alien reproduction as when we counted up the number of people who had been compensated, I reckon the most I should have is 48......
PS
You may be wondering about the pig as officially we don't have any. I'm reliably informed it had wandered into the goat pen and was then passed on to a third party...

2 comments:

Whispering Walls said...

Maybe those people put them back in the herd temporarily for a few weeks' free food before the Christmas cull?

kinglear said...

ww - well believe or not they all have our eartags on them so they are a complete mystery to me. At least with the sheep I KNOW they get eaten....