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    The Armchair Traveller
    The Armchair Traveller
    The Armchair Traveller
    Ebook79 pages1 hour

    The Armchair Traveller

    By Lynne Roberts

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    About this ebook

    This is a collection of lighthearted anecdotes about Lynne's life on the farm with a succession of young foreign farm helpers. Names have been changed but the incidents are all real.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLynne Roberts
    Release dateMar 6, 2014
    ISBN9781927241226
    The Armchair Traveller
    Author

    Lynne Roberts

    Lynne is a writer, musician, dance teacher and porcelain painter, among other things. She lives on an orchard in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand where she breeds donkeys and collects grandchildren. Lynne has written copious numbers of educational teaching resources from pre-school through to tertiary level. She writes story books and fantasy fiction for children and poetry for children and adults, always with a strong vein of humour. Lynne also writes musicals for which she composes the original music.

    Read more from Lynne Roberts

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      Book preview

      The Armchair Traveller - Lynne Roberts

      The Armchair Traveller

      By Lynne Roberts

      Published by Liberty Publications at Smashwords

      Copyright 2014 Lynne Roberts

      ISBN 978-1-927241-22-6

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

      Contents

      Chapter 1. The Beginning

      Chapter 2. Clothing

      Chapter 3. Food

      Chapter 4. Disasters

      Chapter 5. Animals

      Chapter 6. Games

      Chapter 7. Cultural Differences

      Chapter 8. Misunderstandings

      Chapter 9. The End

      Chapter 1. The Beginning

      Picture a winter’s evening. The rain drums on the roof competing with the television where a rugby game is in progress.

      The phone rings.

      A seductive husky voice coos ‘My name is Helga from Sweden. I would like to come and stay with you.’

      Another farm helper is about to come into our lives.

      Friends used to ask us why we seldom travelled anywhere when our children were young. The main reasons for this were the four children themselves. Our car was a large Chrysler Valiant with bench seats front and back. This meant that one child had to sit in the front and the problem was which child to choose.

      Number one son was, and is, of a mathematical turn of mind and consequently exhausting to his parent’s brains. These were already struggling to cope with such minor details as the road, the map, and whether we had remembered to bring enough food, clothing and money plus sufficient games to entertain everyone for the duration of the car trip. The last thing we needed was a front seat passenger whose idea of a good time was to add up the numbers on the number plate of each approaching car, multiply them by the nearest prime number then find the square root of the total, all without using a calculator.

      We tried number one daughter in the seat between us and fared no better. First we had to compromise on having only three of her seventeen Barbie dolls with us in the front seat. Next we had her complaints to put up with. She is an avid reader and kept up a constant moan about the bends and corners in the road which disturbed her concentration. Add to that her unhappy sobs or cries of joy depending on what she was reading and she too was soon banished to the back seat.

      Next came number two daughter. She sat between us, mercifully silent and still. Unfortunately she was also a very poor traveller and soon turned an interesting shade of pale green. So she was duly installed in the back seat beside an open window, much to the annoyance of her brothers and sister. From there she could control the duration of every car trip, as her ability to throw up over, at worst a sibling and at best a parent as well, meant that our car trips were of necessity very brief. It is interesting to note that said daughter now has a car of her own in which she travels the country with all the flair and panache of a rally driver and with no consideration at all for the aged parent having a coronary in the seat beside her. I look forward to the day she has children of her own and hope they will be just as good at travelling as she was!

      We were then forced to try son number two in the front seat. We didn’t make this decision lightly as without his cheerful presence in the middle of the back seat nothing short of brick walls topped with armed guards could prevent the inevitable mayhem in the back as the remaining children tried to tear each other apart.

      Number two son is an avid bird watcher and is keenly interested in the way the world works. (He was once keenly interested in his brother’s calculator, something for which number one son will never forgive him, even though we told him it had gone to silicon heaven.)

      You would be astonished at how many questions one small boy can ask before giving his parents up in disgust as ignorant and unco-operative. In our own defence, by that time we were having the sort of conversation involving shouting at the back seat passengers and trying to prevent actual bloodshed.

      Number two son decided that his fingers were machine guns and he would shoot every bird he could see with loud ‘ack ack’ noises. I had never noticed before that time how many birds could be seen in the New Zealand landscape. Nothing from sparrows to shags escaped his keen eyes until finally in exhaustion we tossed him into the back seat and it was number one son’s turn again.

      After these traumatic experiences we felt that travel as such held no charms for us and instead of exploring the world we decided the world would have to come to us. To broaden our children’s understanding of the world and other cultures we joined a scheme whereby we would host young people from other countries as farm helpers and they would work on the farm for a few hours each day for us in return. This decision was also motivated by finance as kiwifruit returns were going through a low patch and mortgage rates a correspondingly high patch, so the thought of free labour was a huge incentive. Those helpers who wished to work for longer were paid at the going rates provided they had a work permit.

      Shelly and Lynette, two very sweet but naïve Canadian sisters, were the first of the farm helpers we took into our family. They were in their early twenties and had completed their university degrees and decided to spend a year exploring New Zealand and Australia. This, we were to find, was a common pattern with the people who came to stay with us. This meant we were getting bright motivated people who after years of academic study liked nothing better than to do some hard physical work for a change.

      We have a small self-contained cabin adjacent to the

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