The Short Memoirs of a Totally Random and Even More Useless British Teenager

2. Pregnant, Protective and Potently Hormonal (no, I'm not talking about myself)

Okay, so I lied slightly when I said I wanted to be left behind in Bristol (if one good thing came out of the move it was the loss of my pirate-sounding Bristolian accent). To be perfectly honest, I was tingling with anticipation about leaving. I didn’t even miss my friends. It was sort of a matter of “oh, bye then, I’ll never see you again” and I was off.

I was ecstatic. I’d never lived anywhere else in my life before – I’d always been in this boring, typically average city house that had absolutely nothing going for it and could barely squeeze in me, my annoying older sister, my parents and two cats. That, I have always argued, is the reason why I continually tugged at my cat’s tails and tortured them using various psychological methods until they ran away. For more space. One got swiftly turned into cat-pancake on its escape route by a lorry hurtling down our slow paced dead-end drive, whilst the other, I think, took a safer escape route and migrated to live with the old lady across the street. The rest of my family was heartbroken. Needless to say, my devious six year-old mind was not.

The main attraction about moving was the house. It was huge. Garage? Check. Attic? Check. Basement? Check. Random cupboard that no one ever uses? Definitely check.

It had a pond with a bridge on it, it had a random barn which at the time was used for storing old junk, an endless garden that stretched on for eternity and it had a room that I didn’t have to share with my sister. Why am I saying ‘had’? It still has, I’ve been trapped here for ten and a half years of my life.

And with the house came all the traditional things to do with ‘Wales’ I mentioned before. Rain (the amount of times I’ve been flooded I don’t know, and the nearest river is miles and miles away). Hills (entailing long, tedious and painful walks). And sheep. Lots and lots and lots of sheep.

I’m just going to take a quick look out of my bedroom window from where I’m writing this, it’ll only take a few seconds. What do I see?

Twelve fields. Two tractors. Millions of sheep.

My next-door neighbours even keep sheep in their garden, that’s how bad it is. It’s not so terrible on the sheep front at the moment, as it’s the beginning of the summer, the time when we get plagued by cows, horses and geese (such as the aptly dubbed “War goose”, the demonic spawn of Satan who charges at me whenever I walk down the road), not so much sheep. We have to deal with them mainly in the spring time when they’re pregnant, protective and potently hormonal.

It is a fact not commonly known or acknowledged that Welsh sheep are the worst sheep in the world. Take the other day, for example; I was forced to go on a three-hour walk over the Malvern hills (in England) and just as I was starting to relax in the absence of those living thundercloud look-alikes what did I find? Sheep.

But surprisingly, although I shudder to say it, nice sheep.

Sheep that don’t charge at me like bulls the moment I hop into their field. Sheep that don’t have mangy, baggy fleeces smothering their bodies, matted with clumps of dirt and leaves and trees and barbed wire. They’re thin, they’re clean, they’re sleek, they’re even slightly cute at a stretch; they are sheep.

These mutant monsters braying for my blood with gargled bleating outside my house, my friend, are not sheep.

They are an abomination to nature.

I don’t know what the farmers did to make these animals so monstrous. Perhaps it’s the radiation from one of these nuclear explosions in the world, that’s said to still kill sheep in Wales today; perhaps there’s something sinister in the markings that are graffiti-ed onto them to show whose sheep they are; perhaps it’s just because they’re Welsh.

Either way, they terrify me.