I havn’t updated you for a while on my bucolic existence. You may recall I used to keep you regularly informed on how many chickens we had and even what their names were, but despite the frequent revisions and updates necessitated by fox visitations that kept this rich vein of stories fresh, I sensed I was beginning to bore you so I found other stuff to rabbit on about.
You might just be interested to know, however, that a few months ago one of our hens went broody. We don’t have a cockerel at the moment ( I’ll tell you how it all works if you need me to….it always surprise me how often I have to explain this ) but we managed to obtain some fertilised eggs from a friend and popped them under her. Twenty one days later eight chickens hatched. Alas, and this is just one of many blows life is landing me at the moment, seven of them are cockerels. Cockerels don’t lay eggs in case you didn’t know that and their meat, given they have the run of the place, is extremely tough so the vast bulk of our current crop of chickens are essentially useless. They will just eat lots of food and wake the whole village up at dawn. Oh, and they can be very aggressive! We had one once called Mohammed Ali who, crowing like a legend, mounted our Argentinian au-pair - yes boys, gorgeous – and plunged his spurs into her shapely calf. It’s not funny. She had to go to hospital for stitches and an injection.
The one bit of good news this week on the flock front is that the surrogate Mother Hen, having now ditched her chicks in a mixture of relief with a certain amount of trepidation at what will come when her boys are just a little older, has resumed laying enormous double-yolkers. The other day she whacked out a whopper which weighed in at 96gms, though she could hardly walk for the rest of the week. I had the egg for breakfast last Saturday. Check this photo out. It’s AMAZING.
Don’t know why I started banging on about chickens again. Forgive me. After my hefty breakfast, I had quite a busy morning ahead of me last weekend. I wanted to go to Newmarket to open a bank account. I have had it with Coutts charging me £600 a year. Just before I left, Lottie, who had gone off for a ride, rang in to check whether our horses were still in their fields because someone had stopped her to say that they had seen two loose greys and a sheep roaming loose around the countryside. Our horses were safely in their paddocks and we don’t have sheep at the moment. We did have a couple once, Bombadier and Genevieve, however we ate them. So I breathed a sigh of relief and made to get on with my day. However ten minutes later she rang again to say she had come across the stray animals who were now insisting on following her wherever she would go. Dave to the rescue time. I grabbed two head collars and leading ropes, jumped on my bike and found them, about a mile and a half up the road. Inevitably, given my run of bad luck, a continuous stream of vans and cars chose the very moment that I set off for home, dragging and cajoling a small skittish young dappled horse, a chestnut Shetland Pony and with a black goat ( not a sheep ) gallivanting freely behind us , to drive down the normally quiet country lane that led back to our village. It’s a pity I didn’t get a photo. It would have been a touch more amusing, I suspect, than a picture of a fried egg. I made it safely to our house eventually and shut the three of them into a stable. They were reunited with their owners later that day who gave me two bottles of Hardy’s Sauvignon Blanc for my troubles, but I never did get to the bank.
PS Really interesting lunch upstairs today with the CEO of the Scotch Whisky Association. Insights on India, China, Taiwan and Thailand which I’m happy to share with you at some point. But the main thing was that it dawned on me, as I sipped a small glass of Highland Park once the clients had departed, that I have never, in almost 30 years in the City, drunk whisky at lunch before. I’ve had a lot of other stuff needless to say, but not whisky. There’s life in the old dog yet. Oh, I’m in such a generous mood this afternoon, have another photo…..unsurprisingly given the bottle is half empty the background is a bit blurred but lunch on me if you can tell me where the photo was taken???
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