Happy Things

Once upon a time, in a land far away - well
actually not very far away from me, just outside Yass in New South Wales, in fact - there lived a little old lady (played by my mother). In front of her house there was a big dam. One day, to the old lady's great surprise, a beautiful white goose landed on the dam.

To her even greater surprise and considerable delight, each morning when the old lady woke up and looked out her window she saw that the beautiful white goose was still there. After a few weeks, it began to dawn on her that perhaps he had actually decided to make her dam his home. He quickly became involved in the life of the local community, helping the duck families that lived there already, keeping an extra eye out for their ducklings, standing guard against foxes and so on. However, as the autumn approached and the various ducklings grew up and the ducks flew away to wherever they spend the winter, it became clear to the little old lady that the beautiful white goose (which, she suspected, had managed to escape a goose farm, where it was headed for the chop) was lonely.

She consulted her friend on the property next to hers. He said he knew someone who had quite a few geese and might be able to spare her goose a pal. Shortly after that, he turned up with a grey goose that his friend had given him. They let the grey goose free and quickly it and the white goose became inseparable. The question of which was male and which female, or whether they were both in fact male or female, remained an active talking point for the old lady and her neighbours as they watched the delighted new couple cruise about on the dam water. One of the old lady's children held his tongue but worried, when the newcomer disappeared, supposedly to sit on a clutch of eggs. He had read a book by Konrad Lorenz on greylag geese which, among other things, mentioned that geese often formed homosexual relationships. The old lady persuaded her more technically skilled friends to consult the internet on the subject of how to tell which sex a goose might be. The only hint they could find was that, if you see two geese mating, the male is almost invariably the one on the top.

Anyway, all ended well. After a tense few weeks, the grey goose emerged from her hiding place, with a flotilla of eight goslings trailing behind her. The whole family now spend their days cruising the waters of the dam, happy as can be: