“I don’t know what you are planning for Valentine’s Day,“ my wife said, “But for the record I do not want it to in any way involve alpacas.”
I was of course grateful for this proactive stance on her part – for a start, it told me that (a) Valentine’s Day was coming up, and (b) she expected me to do something for it – but the alpaca bit did seem a little redundant.
Now, I am sure alpacas are wonderful creatures, intelligent, useful and environmentally friendly, but I am fairly confident that they are not traditionally associated with romance (even though I do not, technically, know exactly, to the fine details, what they are).
It turns out, however, that someone thinks they are incredibly romantic, according to an article my wife showed me, which was in an actual newspaper and not on the internet, so it must be true. It seems that you can indeed book in a Valentine’s Day picnic which will include an alpaca.
NB to any radical animal rights persons reading this: the alpaca is NOT part of the meal, it is just there, watching you eat, and presumably increasing the general romantic vibe of the picnic. I do not, personally, see how this happens, but I am an old bloke who is not familiar with what young folks consider to be romantic these days (and if it involves an alpaca, I do not want to be).
I may be biased here, because I have experience with animals coming along on picnics. Way back in the day, a girlfriend suggested that she and go horseback riding and have a romantic picnic (as an aside, I find it odd that it is called horseback riding rather than just horse riding. Are there people who ride underneath the horse? Do they wear a helmet? If not, is that where reality TV audiences come from?)
I thought this was a fine idea, apart from the fact that I cannot not ride a horse; I figured I would just bluff my way through it though, which is basically the same strategy I adopted at law school (and look how well THAT turned out!). Unfortunately this never works, because people who can ride horses can spot those who can’t from a mile away; and they find nothing funnier than watching someone who can’t ride a horse – even someone for whom they profess romantic feelings – prove it by hurting themselves.
The key to my strategy was to find a horse that had the specific qualities to suit my skill set – that is, a horse that was so close to death that it’s top speed was similar to the pace at which your fingernails grow (fun fact: 5mm a year, or about the same as continental drift). My strategy was a complete success, as long as the definition of success is ‘fell off on fewer than 10 occasions’. Also, once at the picnic site, the horse ambled off with the saddlebags containing the wine; plus, we also saw a shark at the picnic (seriously) but that is a story for another day.
On another occasion, a group of us went on a picnic, and the girlfriend of a mate of mine brought along her dog, a very large dog, which I am going to call a Great Dane because it isn’t like you are in any position to argue with me. The problem with having a dog on a picnic is that traditionally, picnics take place on the ground, despite the fact that perfectly functional tables are in widespread use in this day and age.
Dogs, of course, have long used the survival tactic of regarding anything on the ground as food, since if something turns out not to be food it comes back out of the dog, one way or the other, usually with no harm done. Plus, when we feed dogs, we tend to put their food on the ground. So at the picnic, when the food was laid out, the dog figured all his Christmases had come at once, and launched himself at it, quickly reducing the picnic banquet to something which resembled a table on the unfortunate ship in The Poseidon Adventure. It did not, however, run off with the wine, which is one of the many reasons dogs are better than horses.
So I am wary of animals on picnics, including the alpaca valentine thing, which is probably just a fad. That doesn’t help my wife (remember her, from the start of the column?) because she is teacher, and teachers are VERY wary of fads. That groan you hear at the start of the school year is not unenthusiastic students, it is teachers wondering what new pointless and ineffective fads will get in the way of actual teaching this time.
For example, recently my wife saw a news item which was extolling the virtues of a song that kids are meant to sing at the start of school, which will make them feel better and of course learn more. The song was written by a rapper, which is a little incongruous in that rappers generally project the same overall level of education as bath soap; certainly, all of them failed music.
I won’t name the rapper in question, but he is the one whose name would, you might think, attract that attention of the estate of the late Charles M Schulz, which one presumes owns the intellectual property of all the Peanuts characters, including Snoopy. I am sure the rappers’ lawyers have checked it out, although they might have missed something as the lawyers for rappers tend to be more familiar with criminal law than intellectual property, if you get my drift.
So no doubt my wife and other teachers will soon have to learn this new song, and then put it with all the other fads from recent years, like functional grammar, phonetics, dictated text, sight-reading, mindfulness, Feng Shui, Mormonism, voodoo and antidisestablishmentarianism, and get on with teaching the kids. The point is, the last thing she needs right now is an alpaca.
On a slightly serious note, for the last 15 or so years I have taken February off alcohol, mostly because February is the shortest month of the year. This year, I figured I may as well do some good since I’ll be grumpy anyway, and have signed up for the Febfast challenge, which raises funds to put towards improving mental health and reducing both substance use-related harm and unwanted involvement with the criminal justice system – you can find out more or donate here: https://febfast.org.au//shane-budden
NB: no alpacas, dogs or horses were harmed during the writing of this column, not sure about the shark.
© Shane Budden 2025
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