A bit of a prick

The first thing you learn when you move to the country from the city is to expect the unexpected.Your education in this typically begins in the first month or two when you gaze out the windows of your new country pile and find yourself looking at something unexpected like, say, half a dozen sheep nibbling at your lawn.

- Greg Dixon

This, you need to keep in mind, will be only the first, and actually pretty gentle, entry in your new mental folder marked "Gadzooks!"

Sooner or later, you will inevitably draw your curtains early one morning for a much, much more intimidating Gadzooks! moment, like rubbing your eyes to make sure you really are seeing a herd of fully grown dairy cows nibbling on your hedges and thundering about your garden.

Between the sheep and the cows there will be far more expensive episodes, such as the evening your dunny cistern fails to refill itself and you discover the water pump has prematurely but permanently died, leading to an astoundingly enormous bill for an after-hours plumber to put in a new one.

At some point, your ongoing experience of expecting the unexpected will come to include some pretty weird, wild stuff – like finding a giant mother possum and her surprisingly large offspring sleeping under your (mysteriously) overturned birdbath.