Todd Alexander - Youve Got to Be Kidding

TODD ALEXANDER has been writing for as long as he can remember. His work has been published in magazines and periodicals, and he is the author two novels and two memoirs. His first novel, Pictures of Us, was published in 2006, followed by Tom Houghton in 2015. In 2019 Todd released his bestselling memoir Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga. It was long-listed for three industry prizes for best non-fiction book.

In 2012 Todd, his partner Jeff and their black alley cat Leroy left their busy city lives for a tree change in the Hunter Valley wine region of NSW. Today, Todd spends as much time as he can with his pig Helga, six goats, two sheep, chooks, ducks and peafowl. He writes whenever he gets the chance.

Web: toddalexander.com.au

Instagram: @toddalexanderwriter

FB: @toddalexanderauthor

Twitter: @Todd_Alexander

HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published in Australia in 2021

by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

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Copyright Todd Alexander 2021

The right of Todd Alexander to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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ISBN 978 1 4607 5928 8 (paperback)

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Photographs by Work of Heart Photographic Studios

For my kids, Lucy & Charlie

I love you just as much as your four-legged siblings,

I swear

There is no point at which you can say,

Well, Im successful now. I might as well take a nap.

Carrie Fisher

Thats it, I said to Jeff. Im out.

Im out too, Jeff said glumly. This isnt what we signed up for.

After almost seven years of pretending to be farmers, you would have thought wed have got our shit together. But I was feeling just as out of my depth as I had the day wed moved in to one hundred acres of vineyards and olive groves with our dream of opening boutique accommodation. Back then, Id pondered just how big one hundred acres was, but that was only after signing the contract for the purchase of Block Eight (a name wed once been determined to change).

Though to most people we might have looked successful, in reality we were constantly worrying where our next bit of income would be coming from, praying that itd arrive before our next bill did. Day to day, we were barely scraping through and it felt like Jeff was checking the bank balance as often as I checked myself on the scales every few minutes. And only one of those numbers was steadily on the rise.

We werent being greedy. Id have been happy to win second prize in a beauty contest the next go around the board, but instead the card I was being dealt was Assessed for street repairs.

Enough was enough. I told Jeff I would give Shelly, the local real estate agent, a call and ask her to come and chat to us about putting Block Eight on the market. Shed been the one to sell us the property in the beginning, and wed stayed in touch with her over the years.

Good, because Im so ready, Jeff said and opened up the laptop to begin searching for a new property to buy. You know, with that million dollars in cash we had buried in an old barrel beneath the olive tree in row twenty eight.

I just want somewhere quieter, I said dreamily.

And we need something thats more financially manageable, Jeff added. Lets face it, we really need to be mortgage-free.

This meant we had a strict budget but also wanted a parcel of land large enough that no other person could ever disturb us we would be the masters of our own noise-making. Oh, and I definitely needed commanding views. In many respects we were firmly back to square one: two city idiots one with a vision of becoming the Hunters version of Maggie Beer, the other with a desire to use his hands to build stuff. No prizes for guessing which one was me.

Turns out, thousand-acre properties with beautiful views for under a million bucks dont exist. Whod have thought?

What about this one? Jeff asked, turning the computer around to show me a bush block of about two hundred acres.

I thought: bushfires, snakes, hemmed-in, no views, too remote, too much hard work all over again and... where would our animals live?

Hmm, looks promising, I said instead.

In truth, I was in mourning. My dream to become the next Maggie Beer hadnt been realised. Sure, I made jams that sold well at a local cellar door, and our wine and olive oil managed to sell out most years until recently, at least but no one had yet snapped me up for a cooking show. And where were the hordes of people coming to our property to eat our food or buy our produce, as they did at Maggies? Is this how Maggie felt when she made the decision to shut down her restaurant and sell the last stake in her food business?

All of that aside, could we really consider going out on a low? The sense of relief I felt at the prospect of no longer needing to manage Block Eight was tinged with a dull ache of sadness that I knew would probably never go away.

Shelly agreed to come and see us the following week. I suppose I wanted her to do cartwheels at the prospect of selling the property as it was, and quote us a price way beyond the bounds of reality. Youre ready to list and youll get four million for it, shed say before spreading a sold sticker over a sign down on the road. Id prepared a list for her of the various tasks I thought we should consider doing before putting the property on the market in the coming spring. I went through the list and asked Shelly to prioritise which of those she thought were most crucial to getting the property sold.

Well, Id do all of those, she said bluntly. Its a slowing market and you dont want anyone to think of hard work; just that they can move in and start making money from the business right away.

When I mentally tallied all that the two of us had to do, it probably amounted to four to six months of constant work at the cost of the best part of one hundred thousand dollars. But then, what was the point of putting the property on the market only to have someone deduct money for jobs we could do at a fraction of the cost?