25th May, 2007

One of the reasons I write about Hen so often is that for the last two or three years we havn't had chickens. Long suffering readers of my weekly will possibly recall this was a previously a recurring theme of mine. Well happy happy day….We are the owners of a new flock, inherited, along with a rather mangy looking cat, when we moved into our new house. Having your own hens, some of you may know is an emotional roller coaster. Mine would invariably be picked off by foxes, or go off the lay and have to be popped into a casserole dish. We had several cockerels whose role, in part, was to defend the hens in the event of an attack. One of them was called Travis. A fine, strutting specimen, as was the pop star he was named after, he was found one morning perched shakily in a tree, his entire clutch of hens having been decimated by a fox overnight. He was rechristened, “Chicken”. Anyway, my son Bob has embraced chicken ownership, not as a source of fairly asinine stories, but as a going commercial concern. Frankly though this has been one long source of angst. From the moment his revenue projections were blown to bits by the realization that eggs sold at £1 a dozen rather than per 6, to being told that he would have to pay for chicken food, that the family would be expecting to eat a good proportion of the eggs laid and that he would have to buy the hens….he has had a harsh introduction to capitalism. And to rub salt ( and pepper ) into the wounds, yesterday evening he arrived at our back door in tears and with egg yolk and shell dripping down his legs. He had put his precious collection of 3 eggs – the entire days lay – in his trouser pockets before running back to the house to flog them at the front gate. He’ll make a stock broker.