If seven maids with seven mops……

Sometimes I know just how the Walrus and the Carpenter felt as they walked along the briny beach contemplating the impossibility of clearing away the sand. These days, whenever I take a pleasant walk about the llama fields, it makes me metaphorically weep like anything to see such quantities of poo.

The problem with my involvement in the whole llama-poo-clearing activity is that it brings out the Obsessive-Compulsive in me. And let’s be honest, the OC side of my personality really doesn’t need much encouragement to come running to the knocked door of opportunity, all dressed up and ready to dance.

Having done such a splendid job of ‘finishing’ off the clearing of the big field while Simon was away, I now feel compelled to try to keep it that way. Which of course means going out there every day to shovel up the droppings of the last twenty four hours, and wheelbarrow them over to join the ever-growing landscape feature which is inadvertently creating a neat, aromatic wind barrier at the fence-line between the llama field and the pig pen.

There is a sound reason for this obsessiveness (of course). Whilst llamas do generally tend to be creatures of habit, and, on a good day, deposit their poo in their chosen toilet area, they do also have a tendency to drift as the pile gets bigger – with the result that one neat pile of pellets pretty soon becomes a veritable river of dung, spreading snake-like across the land. And there comes a point when one of them will just fancy doing it somewhere completely different, because suddenly the attraction of a brand new clean and shiny toilet is too much to resist. And before you know it, the others have got wind of the new development, and started adding their two pennies’ worth to the fresh pile. And (sensible, health-conscious creatures that they are) llamas will not eat the vegetation growing near their poo (even when it gets really lush and grand, because of the fertilising nature of months-old excrement).

But, if you can stop the first pile from getting out of hand, the obliging llamas are much more likely to keep returning to the scene of the original crime, which means only a small part of the field gets mucked up, leaving all the rest of it fresh as a daisy and ripe for the munching thereof. So, unless we want our whole field to turn into a toilet, leaving the llamas with no place to dine, we really do have to keep on top of things.

And there you have it. The rationale behind the apparently irrational. It is good pasture-management. It is good animal care. So how exactly does some activity which is so obviously good-and-sensible manage to metamorphose into the manic proportions of a full-blown OCD? I feel the explanation requires a little poo-related detail. Allow me to share ……

Right. So. Here’s the Thing. It is simply not possible to spend many hours of one’s life bent double over piles of llama poo, engaged in a fairly mindless, repetitive scooping activity, whilst seven llamas continue their toilet around and about you, without becoming Aware. It is a very ‘in the moment’ sort of activity. Like in the whole Buddhist sand-sweeping thing, each little pellet of waste takes on its own a significance. It is not just poo. It is a whole cosmology of crap. Each little bean of brown tells a story. Each little pile has a personality, just like its creator.

Duc and Valentine make matching piles of substance. They create poo of consequence. They systematically build their perfect piles day by day, and their efforts echo the man-made landscaping that occurs in the adjacent field. Their piles are so perfect that it was initially impossible for me to distinguish theirs from the one that Simon had started to create to keep it all together.

Pedro’s poo is manly in the extreme. Little pellets stick together to form stolid, masculine clumps that are oh-so-easy to pick up, but impossible to balance on the summit of the growing poo mountain, so that when the wheelbarrow is emptied, Pedro’s cannonballs tumble down the incline and roll stubbornly back into the surrounding field, where they rest ominously, like unexploded grenades, waiting to blow my poo-clearing plans to smithereens.

Elif’s poo is distinctive in colour. A beautiful mature rich brown. A circumscribed pile of neat, regular pellets, deposited carefully and consistently in easy-to-manage portions. Weighty enough to stay where they fall, in almost perfect circles, usually in the middle of a flat, grass-less space that makes them a poo-clearer’s dream.

Ana’s poo is all over the place. Ana does not like to stand still for very long. She goes where she wants, and she does what she feels like. And she often doesn’t even stand still to poo, endlessly following her curious nose to some little distraction or other in her line of sight – a cat perhaps, a capering crow, a butterfly, a passing villager. Hers is not the easiest poo in the pack to track and corral, but it is at least easy to notice.

Lila’s poo is light and flighty. Each pellet is small and wayward, and when she squats and drops, it patters to the ground like a cascade of tiny hailstones, bouncing off leaf and hummock to spread far and wide, and hide amongst the greenery. It presents the greatest cleaning challenge of all. When I try to scrape it into a pile to pick it up, the pellets ping off the edge of the trowel like out-of-control tiddly-winks, destined for some even more difficult-to-reach hiding place.

Capucine’s poo is very middle-of-the-road. It is the poo that is identified by a process of elimination. Shiny, medium-sized pellets nudging up inconspicuously against previously deposited piles. It likes to belong. It doesn’t like to stand out. It is ‘follower’ poo.

But the one thing that all these poo creations have in common is their agglomerate nature. Unlike pig poo, or dog poo, or even chicken poo, each motion does not result in a single entity, that can be easily removed in its entirety, so that one can look back at a cleared vista and say ” It is Done”. To fully and completely pick up llama poo is an impossible ambition, except for the insane, obsessive perfectionist with all the time in the world and the attention span of an extremely focussed thing. So the task inevitably involves the Making of a Decision. At what point does one stop? At what point does one say, “That’s good enough”? And because of the nature of any cleaning activity, the more one bit becomes clean, the more the unclean bits become noticeable.

It is so hard for me to leave stuff behind. Even though I know that the next day will find the very space I am currently clearing once again bespattered, I face a mental struggle over every last pellet I do not retrieve. It was only when Simon (who happened to have followed me into the field to enjoy the sunshine, during the course of one of my field-cleaning bouts) commented that I was being “rather thorough” that I sensed that something might be amiss. Instantly defensive I challenged his apparently innocent statement. “What are you saying? Do you think I’m being too thorough?…. Oh My God! You think I’m being obsessive, don’t you?” Despite Simon’s remonstrations that he was “Just saying…..”, the Truth could not be put back to bed.

Hi. My name is Valerie, and I am an Obsessive Compulsive. It is true. I spend many moments of my day agonising over whether to scrape up this or that centimetre-sized piece of excrement, and feeling truly awful if one that I have identified as being on the pick-up list escapes my trowel action, and lurks uncollected in the long grass. I waste time deliberating about whether to waste more time hunting it down to retrieve it, or whether to try instead to summon up the monumental strength required to just walk away and Let it Lie. Luckily, the pressure of all the Other Things To Be Done, and the burning pain in my bent back and hunched shoulders conspire to maintain my behaviour vaguely within the bounds of apparent normality.

It’s good to know my that physical incapabilities serve to limit my mental instabilities. If it wasn’t for my back ache, I’d be completely bonkers.