A week in Masterton

MONDAY: Much excitement. We were going on a very big outing. We were going to town.

- Michele Hewitson

We were going to collect our sheep. They are not real sheep. They are cutout, painted plywood sheep that look like they have been created by some nut who constructed them in his man cave while soused.

The sheep have been used since probably the beginning of time to decorate shop windows around Masterton when the annual Golden Shears competition takes over the town and at Christmas. The sheep are historical artefacts. Which is also to say they have seen better days. Some have their feet snapped off. One is wearing a grubby bandana.

We won them in an online auction of mountains of junk that have been stored in the derelict and doomed-to-be-demolished Masterton Town Hall. There had been, I told the keeper of the mountain of junk when we went to pick up our sheep, a fierce online battle we were determined to win. She laughed, gleefully, and said: “I'll tell you who the real winner is. It's me. I get rid of all this stuff.”