The Llama of Our Discontent

I am sitting here staring at a blank screen waiting for inspiration. If a blog is to be a blog of substance, it has to be kept up to date. It has to have new stuff on it that people can read. And I hate the thought that, after a large number of days with no exciting posts to read, our audience will begin to desert us, one by one, like bored children at a circus, tired of watching the pathetic clown doing his same old falling-off-the-chair act, whilst waiting impatiently for the flame-swallowing elephants on unicycles that they had been promised.

Well, I’m sorry to say that we are a bit short of metaphorical flame-swallowing elephants at the moment, so I’ll just have to do what I can to make the chair-tumbling clown seem more interesting. Let me start with Lenny the Turbulent.

Lenny has now been with us for a month. Four whole weeks and three days. Long enough to have got used to his new home and his new friends, and to have settled down a bit. You might think. And to be grudgingly fair, I suppose he has a little. Just a tiny little bit.

He still hurtles menacingly to the fence line every time one of us walks past, and follows us round, snorting and alarming and spitting at us if he can. But whilst I was in England, Simon discovered the amazing repellent properties of sprayed water, and one squirt from a water-filled washing-up-liquid bottle is usually sufficient to get Mad Lenny to back off for a few moments – long enough to allow us to deposit some tasty concentrate on the ground for the females to get to, once Lenny has been enticed off to another part of the field.

Despite the fact that we have been unable to make any direct contact with the females since Lenny’s arrival, we continue to have a sort of rapport with them that is able to operate at a distance. We exchange stoic glances and knowing looks, and between us we manage to manipulate Lenny’s madder antics so that the ladies get to eat and drink water for brief, undisturbed moments. Elif is a particularly canny camelid, and has developed the extremely effective tactic of making a feint in the general direction of Duc and Valentine’s field, so that Lenny will go hurtling off to defend that boundary, leaving Elif free to quickly double back and sneak in to eat the hay in the corner that Lenny has just vacated.

But all in all, Lenny is still decidedly bonkers. He continues to charge about for much of the time, defending his every boundary against imagined threats, and when he charges towards a proffered bucket of tasty concentrate, even he doesn’t seem to know whether he will eat it or spit at it.

On reflection I suspect that any calming-down that has taken place, has occurred because all the other llamas have now got the measure of Mad Lenny and know what to do to avoid winding him up. Duc and Valentine simply don’t ‘play’ when Lenny rushes snorting to their mutual boundary to strut and spit and proclaim his studdish superiority. They just turns their backs and graze on, calm in the knowledge that he is on the other side of a secure fence, and is nothing but bluster. And the girls keep track of his wacky whereabouts, and don’t make any sudden moves that might trigger a mad bout of leg-nipping chasery. And they especially don’t make any moves towards us as we walk around their field boundary, even though that is what they have always done, and that is what they would always do, if only Mad Lenny hadn’t dropped from the dark skies of discombobulation to disturb their calm little haven of complacency.

I have to admit that I am finding Lenny hard to like. I feel a little guilty saying that. Like an easy-going teacher confronted with a naughty child possessing no redeeming qualities, I try to act as if I like him, in the hope that I can build a positive and productive relationship with him. But deep down I feel no real affection for him. Sometimes I feel pity for him – he seems so confused and unhappy. But he is so frequently unpleasant in his interactions with us, and – worst of all – so unpredictable, that I find it hard to envisage a future time when I would be anything other than relieved to see him go.

Poor Lenny. Poor unwelcome, unloved Lenny. Even as I write these things I feel moved to go outside with a bucket of food and try once again to find a way to engage with the Hapless Llama of Discontent. And even as I fill my extended bucket of friendship with nice and tasty things and head towards the gate of hope, I know with a sad and sinking knowingness, that I can expect nothing in return but a snorty shower of green, aggrieved rejection.