As a junk junkie and idle spendthrift subsisting on an ever shorter shoestring, I need retail thrills that won’t shrink my paltry nest egg to the point where I’m hawking what’s left of my earthly shit to tuppenny hagglers on CPN. I also need a raison d’etre, no matter how flimsy, for every purchase, otherwise I feel I’m just wasting those dwindling dollars on more unnecessary tat…oh…never mind. Anyway. This week I enabled myself with a shopping excuse combo so exciting it made me squeal out loud when I thought of it: Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year. Weeeeee!!!
First stop for frittering was the air conditioned faux Ginza luxe of the Japanese bargain shops at Aeon. Muji they ain’t, but still, I came away $9.50 lighter and reasonably satisfied with five things that only me and a tween pachinko savant from Roppongi Hills could appreciate. My lunar-n-love-themed haul included a ballpoint pen with a heart that lights up for Hubster on the 14th, cotton balls, pipe cleaners and craft glue that will have Bunster nailing a miniature three-legged mouflon come February 19.
Despite these satisfactory purchases at my favorite Nipponarium, I felt a nagging lack, specifically in the oriental ovine department. I needed a lot of spangles, a lot of red fringes and something overtly sheepy, Chinesey and/or cheesy to bring in this New Year 4713. Only one thing for it: O’Russei.
Oh, O’Russei. You messy, stinking, glorious basket case of market porn. Your vendors are ruder than Russian, and your floor plan more confusing than Escher on crack. You’re a daunting, ramshackle Babylon that shames the rest of CharmingVille’s wannabe souks. You make Olympic look like Westfield Milton Keynes. Or all of Canberra, Australia.
There’s no air, no air con, and I’ve never seen a fire exit. Between the barrow boys hauling bushels of plastic lobsters and the stout, shouty bean dragons perched atop their leguminous sacks, surely I’d find a modestly priced homage, in paper or plastic, to this New Year’s astrological animal: a woolly, jolly green jumbuck.
It’s nice to see the peaceable sheep get a guernsey this festive turnover. What quiet achievers those amiable, flocculent fellows are in life and, well, served with Auntie Shirley’s mint sauce. Unless you’re an overweening herbivore, an observant Jain, or it’s Lent, roast lamb knows no colour or creed. It’s the equal opportunity protein, the dove to pork’s hawk. The ovine Dalai Llama.
I’ve known sheep all my life. I was cast as a manger lamb every nativity play at Sunday school. Back in those days I didn’t enjoy getting around on all fours and making animal noises as much as I do now, but it was better than being a tree or that shady old perv, Joseph.
As a vexatious teen, my parents resorted to dramatic threats with “The Jam Spoon,” back when it was perfectly acceptable to give your recidivist kids a damn good thwack on the arse with a wooden kitchen tool. My parents, bless their magenta bellbottoms, were hopeless disciplinarians, so they hit on the perfect way to rid themselves of the dauntless jezebel I’d become: they’d hurl me onto some tiny, turbo prop Tassie-bound plane and off to Grandpa’s sheep farm. Down there, I’d steal Gran’s cooking sherry, then spend weeks angsting around the paddocks, pretending I was in Wuthering Heights. My only companions were the odd, staggering mixamatosed rabbit and hundreds of woolly Suffolks staring at me quietly, shifting from leg to leg, as I raged and sobbed, high and low in hormone hell. On my recent trip to the Nordics, I rummaged through the woolly pelts of half a dozen mild mannered flock mates, soothing my frostbitten hands in their lanolined fleece. I watched naked wethers exit shivering from an old tin shearing shed at a friend’s place. I know goats ain’t sheep, but near enough according to my personalised online oracle. Every time I visit the folks I head straight for the petting zoo with pockets full of pellets and paper and make those little tinkers do tricks for hours on end. And who doesn’t love those bouncy, fluffy stars from YouTube: the skittery, joyful sheep who thinks he’s a dog, the goats boinging up and down on a sheet of tin, and the adorable lamb ‘n’ rhino biffies in the phone ad.
It’s a green ram/goat year this year. Honorouble Google tells me we’ll be bathed in harmonious, tranquil yin energy, coexisting with others without conflict or harm. This doesn’t surprise me. With under a hundred mild eyes on Grandaddy’s sheepy lot, my rage against everything dwindled to a pathetic bleat. Back at O’Russei I was suddenly divinely calm, despite the Faustian din, having purchased the quintessential CNY decoration: an anthropomorphic anime lamb dressed like a palace eunuch in a gold cheongsam and perky Qing toque. These placid, unruffled ungulates are onto something. Let’s hope that the warring world wakes up under a nice soft, woolly blanket next Thursday. Gong Xi Fa Baa.