Sirikit was named after Thailand’s Queen, probably because I spent too much of my childhood poring over the pages of NZ Woman’s Weekly.
A fat woolly Romney lamb did not have the glamorous chops of Her Majesty, but at our school pet day I still expected her to be a prize-winner.
I had spent time training her to put up with being led.
At home she was great, when she wasn’t distracted by nibbling the leaves off the roses, but the spotlight of the showing ring brought out a different side of her character.
After a few cursory steps, she dug in her little trotters and refused to budge.
Oh, the embarrassment. Especially when one of my uncles was the judge.
My memory has blanked out how we managed to wrestle her out of the ring, but I know it was without any sort of ribbon adorning her chubby little neck.
Annoying. I am sure she was the best lamb there.
For years I told myself I couldn’t win anyway because it would have been nepotism.
But recently, I found out the Auckland-dwelling sister won a first prize with her lamb, in an event judged by the same uncle.
She didn’t enjoy the win because she suspected he might have just given her the prize because she was his niece.
Worse, she felt ongoing guilt because she had washed her lamb. That action resulted in an attractive white fluffy fleece but would have stripped the wool of its lanolin and made the lamb vulnerable in cold or wet weather.
Winning is not all it is cracked up to be.
I would like to say losing gave me the impetus to improve my training regime, to make sure the next pet lamb was show-ready and faultless but, no, the loss hastened my retirement from the animal training game.
In my defence, I did not rant about the unfairness of it, never speak to my uncle again, give the unsuspecting Sirikit a good talking to or swear off wool for life (I have had bouts of obsessive knitting, but perhaps that is best left for the psychiatrist’s couch).
Compare that with United States President Donald J. Trump, who, after not winning the Nobel Peace Prize, petulantly told the Norwegian prime minister, who does not award the prize, he no longer felt obligated to think purely of peace.
Peace is kind of more important than winning a prize, training a pet lamb or having your overblown ego bruised.
Resilience is what the Donald needed (I know, I did too, but my excuse is sometimes you have to realise you are never going to be good at something and leave it to others — I can send you my list on this if you pay the postage).
We hear a lot about resilience.
Every time there is a disaster there is gushing about communities’ resilience, the heroic way people band together and keep on keeping on.
As I view the aftermath of every climate catastrophe, I wonder what the tipping point will be to turn that resilience to anger about the paucity of leadership, not just from this government, on climate change issues.
Our prime minister has his own form of resilience.
He’s hanging in there, telling us he is one of the grown-ups in the room and hoping he will be a winner in this year’s election, despite giving a State of the Nation speech which did not seem to be about the country I live in.
There was no direct reference to climate change, or the environment, the cost of living, or health. House prices were mentioned but housing provision hardly got a look in, with him only referring to the government’s direction change enabling greater housing development.
No talk of how many houses Kāinga Ora might have built by now if the government had not stopped its momentum.
The environment has never been to the forefront of his three state of the nation speeches, just getting a mention in his 2024 offering when he was talking of striking the balance between protecting the environment and building for the future.
A recent poll showed more than half of voters would prioritise environmental standards than fast tracking of mines or other major projects, even at the cost of potential economic benefits and jobs.
Is anyone listening?
P.S. It has now been revealed, not only did the coiffed lamb win a prize, but Dad also gave my sister the money for it after its one-way trip to the freezing works. In my animal wrangler days, he pretended he sent pet lambs there by mistake.
No money came my way. I am trying to be grown up about it.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
