Walking down a country road...

After that horrible anxious moment of waking up and thinking you’ve slept through you’re alarm and now you’re really late for work, and you’ll probably be fired, and forced to do something treacherous to make a living and... then, realising that it’s Sunday and you snuggle back into your covers not caring about the time.

It’s the first Sunday that I’ve had absolutely nothing to do, and after relishing it, I was a bit lost. What can I do? I feel like you need knowledge to have fun in the country. There’s an amazing surf beach, but I don’t know how to surf, I want to learn eventually but I’m a bit scared of drowning at that rough west coast beach, you see people riding horses, but I don’t have a horse, and I don’t know how to ride one. I have no interest in hunting or fishing... but I do have legs! So off I go down Turkey Flat road in Te Koporu.

First off, it wasn’t flat, and I didn’t see one turkey, so misleading if you ask me, but it was lovely... Peaceful. Rolling countryside with dairy farms either side and the metal road is lined with heather. I wondered whether or not I could be a farmer.

I came to a paddock full of cows that looked like dalmations who watched my every move. I thought how healthy and fat they looked, and then I noticed one had blood all down its backside. Me, getting all up on my animal welfare high horse took a few steps closer to investigate - this cow had just become a mama. In the grass was a mass of black, with mama cow, and another – probably an aunty - licking off all the gore of child birth. I was a bit worried that this mass of black was dead, but then I saw a wee white head rise up. I felt a wee bit like I was in a David Attenborough documentary and considered becoming a vegetarian, how can I eat steak again when I have seen the tender love a mama cow gives its calf?

The people I’m staying with are rearing four calves to eat. They feed them grapefruit and apples and when you see them, they give you a nudge of affection. I really don’t think I could kill an animal once I got to know them. Once they started to talk about eye fillets, scotch fillets and enough meat in your freezer to last ya the year, my guilt of killing an animal soon subsided. And isn’t it better to eat an animal that you know was treated well, and loved, and killed humanly than getting it from a supermarket in those clean and sterile packets having no idea of where they came from?

I walk away thinking that yes, I could be a farmer, and I would give animals a great life before they went off to the animal farm in the sky, but then a ute and trailer pass loaded with calves whith desperate, panicked and frightened stares and I hope like hell there not going to be turned into veal, and I wondered if the mass of black in the paddock is among them.