Sometimes I sensed I was a disappointment to him, made him sad, made him feel like a failure. <\/p>\n
Because he saw me as a challenge, and that, with time and the right sort of moulding, he just might transform this wimpish urban waster into a contender for Young Farmer of the Year. <\/p>\n
It was a challenge he wasn\u2019t up to. It just wasn\u2019t ever going to happen. <\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t like the smell of oilskin wet-weather gear, I didn\u2019t like the smell of wet sheep, or \u201cawful\u201d pits. <\/p>\n
I preferred the cosy, comfortable dry fug of the city. <\/p>\n
So there were some very basic and insurmountable obstacles to The Hat\u2019s plans for me. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do you want to do with your life?\u201d asked The Hat one night.<\/p>\n
I think he was hoping I might have had an epiphany, a realisation, and had suddenly embraced the soil as the true meaning of life. <\/p>\n
But no, it was just yucky stuff that got down behind your nails. <\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know what I am doing tomorrow, or next week, let alone my life,\u201d I admitted to The Hat. <\/p>\n
A ship without a compass. A person without purpose. A lost cause. <\/p>\n
He nodded in despair yet again and shuffled off. <\/p>\n
And I went back to my school history essay on Giuseppe Garibaldi, though that was as interesting as lambing percentages and facial eczema spores. <\/p>\n
The next day, The Hat was again staring despondently at me as he threw his head 45 degrees to save his eyebrows while lighting his pet cigarette stub. <\/p>\n
He then asked me to take the old truck and dump some stuff in the \u201cawful pit\u201d – three blue, bloated, moulting carcasses on the deck.<\/p>\n
I backed the truck up to the \u201cawful\u201d pit and tipped the tray. <\/p>\n
I would raise it until just the carcasses fell off into the pit, then drop it again. <\/p>\n
I wasn\u2019t counting on the avalanche. <\/p>\n
Everything on the deck \u2013 shovels, post-hole borers, other fencing gear, rolls of wire and a large tool box, as well as my future in the agri-sector – careened off into the \u201cawful\u201d pit. <\/p>\n
I was doomed and damned. And it would only confirm what The Hat was already thinking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sometimes I sensed I was a disappointment to him, made him sad, made him feel like a failure.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18711,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[20212,138,2199,6097,20211,20209,121,3233,20214,78,1899,111,139,69,20213,20216,20210,20215,14036],"class_list":["post-18710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-awful","tag-business","tag-city","tag-down","tag-dumped","tag-entire","tag-fail","tag-farm","tag-hunter","tag-in","tag-kids","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-pit","tag-shebang","tag-truckload","tag-wells","tag-whole"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}