Last weekend, My Partner and I took Kit to a party. When I arrived, fresh from the chiropractor, we met the entertainment: A Mechanical Bull. I suspect that mechanical bulls are a chiropractor’s wealth creation scheme. That no chiropractors attended, let alone rode The Bull, only reinforced my suspicion.
I was encouraged to have a go. After all it was surrounded by a crash pad, and could be stopped remotely at any time. I would have felt more at ease if it could have been stopped by me at any time! Nevertheless, I threw caution to the wind (along with any hope of being able to tie my own shoe laces in future), and clamoured on.
It felt slightly less stable than riding a surf board while sitting on a giant stick of butter.
My Partner immediately took out his phone… just in time to film my leisurely and dignified dismount. He and Kit persuaded me to try again so they would have a video for posterity to laugh at. [Kit says, “For everybody to laugh at, not just Posterity.”] I complied with this request by being videoed sliding off sideways.
Then My Partner had a go. He appeared to be mediating a violent disagreement between his limbs and his body about whether they wished to continue their association. Fortunately, they did.
Afterwards, Kit regaled His Father with the story of visiting my family in Wellington and riding a real sheep.
Only True Adventurers visit Wild Wellington, where the winds are so strong they blow the freckles off your face, and your ice-cream off the cone. Not that any sensible person would eat ice-cream in the climate produced by New Zealand’s capital city. Being neither sensible nor a person, Kit found out the hard way just how strong the wind was. I took him inside to eat his replacement ice-cream.
As he had heard that there are 20 sheep for every person in New Zealand, Kit was convinced that they would be gambolling down every street, and plodding through shopping centres, ejecting steaming piles of poo. He surveyed his surroundings in disbelief as he saw person after person, with neither a sheep nor a poo in sight.
At long last, we did meet a sheep, and he went for a ride. By Kit’s estimation his efforts were fit to rival someone juggling puppies whilst riding a unicycle along a tightrope over crocodile infested waters.
At the very least, he is certain that his skill riding a taxidermied rocking sheep was more impressive than mine on The Mechanical Bull. Sadly, he is probably right. At least I can still tie my own shoe laces.