Read Online The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society by Chris Stewart - Free Book Online Page B

job well done. But we couldn’t do that here, not in the tick-infested wool we had just shorn, so instead we had to sit on a stone in the hot evening sun. Paco begrudgingly handed each of us a tin of warm beer, which we sipped while watching him count, with trembling hands, the notes he owed us.
    With a beer inside us, I revived enough to dismantle the machinery and pack up, while José cleaned off the combs and cutters and set up the grinding wheel. At which moment a tough, dapper little man with short grey hair appeared panting through the woods, followed by a coupleof beautiful and very woolly Pyrenean mountain dogs. ‘Are you… the shearers?’ he gasped, wiping his face with a crisp, white cloth.
    I could see what was coming. Goats, shorn sheep, dogs: it was becoming a theme of the day.
    ‘Yes,’ we said noncommittally.
    ‘I… I’m… so glad I caught you,’ he continued, still panting . ‘Could you… take the wool off these… dogs for me?’  
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said José, ‘but we’ve taken down all the gear and…’
    ‘But look here, I’ve just climbed all the way up here from the village to get these dogs sheared…’
    ‘We don’t do dogs,’ I said matter-of-factly.
    ‘What do you mean, you don’t do dogs?’ He was getting heated and a little aggressive. ‘You’re the shearers, aren’t you? These dogs need shearing and I’ve just busted a gut getting all the way up here. How dare you tell me you don’t do dogs!’
    José had his head in his box, packing his gear.
    ‘Look, it’s simple,’ I repeated. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble but it’s hardly any fault of ours and, as I said, we don’t do dogs. This gear isn’t designed for…’
    ‘Hey, you,’ he snarled, looking at me with narrowed eyes. ‘You’re not one of us. Where are you from? What are you doing here?’
    ‘I’m from England but I live here,’ I answered blithely, unscrewing the head of my machine.
    ‘Oh, so you’re one of those bloody foreigners then, are you?’
    ‘Well,’ I said brightly, ‘I’ve lived here for a long time but I wasn’t born here so I guess that makes me a foreigner, but my daughter was born here so she’s a native…’
    ‘You foreigners – you come here and pollute our culture – what you ought to be doing is do your job then fuck off back where you came from. We don’t need you here taking the homes and land away from honest farmers!’
    This was irresistible and I leapt gleefully into the fray. ‘Pollute your culture? If you know anything about your culture at all, you’d know it’s been enriched by foreigners for centuries and would be a shrivelled and half-arsed thing without them.’
    Our new friend’s eyes nearly burst out of their sockets at this, and he seemed almost to hop with rage. He turned towards José, who kept his head down, bent over the sharpening wheel. ‘Who is this… this… person?’ he spluttered.
    ‘Oh,’ said José, still intent upon the fast spinning wheel. ‘I shear with him, he’s a friend of mine.’
    The little man stood between us, breathing deeply, looking from me, sitting in the sun cradling my shears, to José crouched over the grinding wheel. Finally he calmed down a bit and said with just a touch of a whine: ‘Look, I really need to get these dogs clipped, and…’
    ‘I already said’ – I interrupted – ‘we don’t do dogs.’
    ‘I’m not talking to you!’ he snapped.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said José standing up and stretching. ‘But the foreigner’s the boss. I do what he tells me, and it looks like he doesn’t want us to shear your dogs.’ He smiled pleasantly , trying to bring the argument down a gear.
    ‘Right,’ snarled the little man as he thumped back down the track into the woods. ‘I’ll not forget this. You’ll be hearing from me.’ And, so saying, he disappeared amongst the trees.
    ‘He was a laugh, wasn’t he?’ I said to José, as we watched him out of sight.
     ‘No, he wasn’t – he was