Madame Galina's Doings Diary

Two Nanny Goats Guff

Two nanny goats, Sorrel and Sage, delayed the delivery of the beads for my new tutu.

Katy Lonsdale made this.

It’s glorious, isn't it? Now I no longer need be jealous of the ballerina playing Gamzatti in the Bolshoi Bayadere. Sorry, I know this is disloyal to the Royal, but someone needed to tell what’s-her-name - once sat next to me at a general of Symphonic Variations and exclaimed loudly like my nan shouting at the wrestling on TV: Yolanda Sonnabend, that’s it - about the perils of brown.

Katy somehow managed to create the tutu in three square feet of workroom on her family’s farm in Yorkshire. I went up there last week for the final tweekings, hookings and eyeings, as guest of Katy, her parents Dilys and Tom, five Aberdeen Angus cows, two mares, four cats, a sheep ready accessorized with sheep dog, Sorrel and Sage.

The Lonsdales hate Sorrel and Sage.

“Even more now they’ve delayed Katy doing the fine beading on your new costume”, said Dilys. “But they always do the opposite of everything you want them to.”

As all they’re required to do is go outdoors to eat grass and come indoors once more to be milked and to sleep, I wanted to know how.

“If you open the gate of their stalls to let them go out, they trot and stand at the opposite wall and won’t move. If you think “bugger you” and close the gate again and leave the bloody things where they are, before you’re two steps across the yard you’ll hear the clang of them butting at the gate to get out. So you go back and open the gate again. More difficult this time as they’ll have wedged themselves against it, cow-eyes on you, going hell for leather for the sympathy vote.

‘”Get off the bloody gate, Sorrel” or Sage, whichever one it is of the two, you have to shout. And then there you’ll be pushing their heads back as shouting at them to get off the gate of course only made them lean more heavily on it. A good right hook comes into play now. They’re off the gate, you open it, and blow me if they don’t trot away to the back of the stall again. You feel like you’ve just slid down the biggest bugger of a snake back to the start square. As many as eighteen times I’ve done this with Sorrel.

‘When finally you’ve got them in the field, meanwhile missing phone calls galore– delivery men with something urgent who can’t find their way up to the farm, for instance – they stand in the same two foot of grass literally fifteen foot from the house and stare at you over the wall.

‘“Eat the bloody grass”, you shout. And whenever you happen to be passing them, you shout the same thing all day.

‘When it’s time to fetch them in when it turns cold, which it does up here as you can imagine, you go out and call their names, and they career up the hill to the far boundary, start chopsing on the grass, and keep one eye on you dancing to the devil piping and screaming at them to come back. I’ve often had to get the shotgun out at this juncture. Been sorely tempted to shoot the couple of shits, but vented my fury firing into the air. They get the message anyway. Back they come in the dark. You can just about make out their white shapes.

'"Don't you even...!!" too late: they've diverted just before the doors to the barn and run round the back of it to trample among the ducks who are still sitting out there when they should have been in their house for all that time you've been wasting. Luckily, it takes Sage in particular a bit of time for a careful aim to butt the poor little beggars, so you can make a grab for her beard and get her inside, at least. Old bastard of a Billy we had before the two nannies got to one too quick for me one night and we had roast duck that weekend with a ready made dent for the l'orange.

‘Then it’s milking time. Take Sorrel – no, go on: she’ll fit in your spare tutu bag with a little origami skill – when I was teaching her to be milked, the first time I got her to stand still long enough to produce a full bucket, she stepped backwards into it. Ruined. I tipped the rest of it over her head and left her like that, I was so angry.

‘The goats are the reason we can’t go away as much as we’d like to (mainly to put some distance between us and them). Who in their right mind would want to look after them? You’re on nanny watch all the bloody time. Let alone that most people think that to milk them all you do is sit on a nice rustic stool grandpa whittled and squeeze like you would with toothpaste and they’re going to stand there all nice and docile, when what actually happens is that they crane round trying to look at you like they’d never seen you before you’d think from the look of curiosity on their faces, lurching off sideways, missing the bucket and buffeting you from pillar to post…”

Which reminded me. How did the goats make my tutu beads late?

“Oh, because while we’re doing all this, we’re out of sight and hearing of the front of the house, and the delivery man - not our regular postman, who’d know to poke his head over the wall at the back and watch the goaticide going on, but the one from the tiaras, beads and other fancy goods emporium, has come and gone leaving a card saying to ring the depot to arrange a redelivery. And of course you’d be more successful table-tipping than get them at the depot to answer the phone, so you try again when you have time – if you have time off from playing Nanny-Antics – and when you do finally get through they’re quite offish with you, practically accusing you of living at Wuthering Heights. I know it’s a bit of a bendy incline but we’re not all mad up here - well, maybe Robert got a bit Heathcliff last time he was here in his reading week from drama school, flouncing about being above us and starting a rumpus when I mixed onion with tuna, “Two perfectly good foods and you have to go and mix them, mother” at ear-splitting decibels now he’s had his voice trained and knows how to project. I can remember very well going to see him do plays with the Lawrence Batley Youth Group when you could never get him to open his mouth wide enough. And I thought he was going to have a fight with his father when Tom said, “Well done, Robert” when Rob’d insulted us all during a rant that started off being about a bit of mold he found on a strawberry in the trifle - but that’s no reason for the woman manning the phone at the parcel depot holding your tutu beads past the deadline to talk like we’re all descended from the black Irish in Liverpool, cos that’s what I read at my Book Club: Heathcliff most likely was, as were the Brontes themselves. There’s where I go to Book Club, look: look out of this side window, down there in that grey building. Just one term’s worth a year of it, and now we’re onto Dance Fitness, except there’s so little of an artistic bent to it, I’d call it just fitness. And, you see, if I’d thought about it, as I go down there a couple of times a week, I’d have had the beads delivered down there where Karen, the receptionist, isn’t a slave to the barminess of goats. But still I’m really sorry the work went over schedule and you’ve had to wait two weeks when you could have been wearing the tutu onstage.”

As the saying goes: Do you want to be right or happy?

Would you want to have your tutu on time or this Nannyiad?