So, here I am, laid up in a hospital bed with nothing to do, BUT! With access to the internet. About time I blogged, methinks. And what, sez you, are you blogging about, today? (fast-forward to when I am ACTUALLY posting this - I am NOT laid up in a hospital bed - I wrote this at Christmas!)
Well, it's got to be the chickens.
Rewinding several years, I have been talking about getting chickens for quite some time. I've talked myself into it and out of it on numerous occasions. So much so that I had got a little dizzy and wondered whether to shelve the whole idea. With last spring having been so ghastly, however, and the veg patch hence having got itself into such a naughty MESS with that bastard Bindweed swarming up everything in sight and strangling the living daylights out of it, I had mentioned to my good friend S that I'd done a bit of research and wondered whether letting some chickens loose in the veg patch through the winter might result in the ground up there being pecked and scratched bare, naturally fertilised, and ending up ready for me to swan in in spring 2013 and plant the bugger up without having to have put in much effort at all. THAT is a very long, nay epic, sentence.
Anyway, S thought this a good plan, so when she heard that some chickens were available and looking for a new home, she gave me a ring. Well, I could have dithered forever, of course, but being presented with a fait accompli moved things along considerably.
The hunt for a henhouse began. These seem to range from costing 99p off eBay for something which you go and collect from where it's been standing for the last millennium, and good luck if it falls apart, to almost £5k for a henhouse shaped and painted up like a gypsy caravan, if you please. Very pretty, but you'd have to sew up their bums so they didn't poo in it, at that price, so not terribly practical.
S to the rescue again! We bartered a copy of my book for a henhouse, which then appeared fully built and ready to go. Gawd bless yer, yer ladyship! We were in business!
At this point, what I should have done was spend a couple of hours attaching the roofing felt to the roof and making the henhouse generally weatherproof. I realise that now. I have been a very silly boy.
Instead, I rang the lady who needed the chickens rehoming, and we went to get them pretty much on the spot. Excitement is a wonderful thing, but a bit of tempering goes a long way.
We - four adults and four (five?) children, then spent the best part of an hour chicken-chasing! What fun - in and out of holly bushes, under sheds, around all sorts of assorted obstacles the clever chickens led us. We got two safely stowed in the cat basket, only to fail to secure the door sufficiently, so they escaped and needed recapturing. After much hilarity (and a discovery of an irritating diffidence in myself when it came to actually pouncing on the little devils) we eventually had four hens and a magnificent cockerel under lock and key and ready to move into their new home.
Now, a word about our magnificent cockered. Magnificent is too small a word, really. Look:
I know, right? You want to see more, don't you. Here you go:
Who's a pretty boy, then?
People keep asking me whether I realise that a cockerel is not strictly necessary - or indeed at all necessary - for egg production. Yes, I know this. The absence of cockerels and the presence of eggs at virtually all the houses of my chicken-owning chums has alerted me to this fact. However, four hens and a cockerel were looking for a home, and we felt it would have been churlish in the extreme to have accepted the hens, while leaving the cockerel to his fate. Not on my watch. So four hens and a cockerel we accepted. We were a little concerned when people told us that cockerels can be aggressive, attacking small animals and children, and not too keen on the whole crack-of-dawn-crowing aspect of the thing, but on the whole, we felt it was worth a go. And we were assured that "Lucky" would not behave badly or wake everyone up.
Then we saw him, and it was, for me, love at first sight. If anyone had tried to take him away, I would have done battle. Just gloriously, hugely, cockerelly GORGEOUS from head to strutting toe.
I have to tell you at this point (and this is a bit of a spoiler, so if you don't want to know, look away), Lucky has since strutted off to the great hen coop in the sky.
I just wanted to get that out of the way before you invested as much emotion in him as I did.
However, for the time being, in blogland, he is safe and well.
We decided that Lucky was not the right name for him. Insufficiently dignified, we felt. So why we settled on Brian, I'm not sure - but the name fit and stuck. Brian, he was.
Back at the house, we introduced the chickens to the henhouse, where, my dear friend R had told me, they must remain locked up for 24 hours and not a minute less, to allow them to "imprint" their new home on their tiny, mad, chicken brains. This we duly did. It was at the point when the chickens were safely (h)ensconced (sorry) in their lil' coop, however, that I registered that I hadn't yet felted their roof. Damn, bugger and hell. Feeling that hammering endlessly and repeatedly on their roof on their first day might not help them settle in, and might indeed push them right over the edge, we hauled out the store of old growbags and plastic compost sacks and arranged them in a hideous, but relatively rainproof, layer on top of the house.
24 hours later, it was with some trepidation that we released the birdies into the veg patch, but there was no cause for concern. They emerged happily from their little doorway, and attacked my cabbages with relish.
Look at Brian - his head's a blur. He LOVES it!
The chickens all settled in very well, and entertained me endlessly with their sometimes curious, sometimes contented and sometimes mysterious bwooooaarking. Getting them up in the morning is a pure joy, and they put themselves to bed at night, so we just slip up at dusk and lock them safely in. I have had to force myself not to spend hours sitting in the garden with them pecking around my feet while I draw them, but I foresee some happy summer days coming up in 2013, doing just that.
For ten days, all continued in this fine and happy fashion. Brian and the girls (who gradually got names - in order of naming: Elvis Egg-Pelvis, Alex Eggslaid-Chamberhen, Bob Mar-lay and finally Captain Morghen) strutted, trotted and bwoarked their way freely around the garden during the day, and snuggled up cosily in their (almost weatherproof) henhouse at night. No eggs appeared, but I wasn't worried. Their winter job is to clear the veg patch, and I expected no eggs, due to them being of indeterminate age, having just been moved, AND the time of year. Elvis is always first out in the morning, Brian always last, liking to have a bit of a peer out through the door for a couple of minutes to ensure that the world is just as it should be, before emerging, triumphant, into the morning sun.
Then, one sunny Thursday afternoon, having had to release, feed and run in the morning and having hence not had time to admire Brian's slow emergence, I went to see the chickens and could find no sign of Brian. Investigation (involving me crawling on hands and knees into the tiny run in front of the doorway) revealed him lying down, cold as stone, inside the henhouse. Brian, it seemed, was no more.
With a heavy heart, I pulled him out of the house via the roosting box, and gave him a hug. It seemed that his feet twitched, so I tried to warm him up in case this was a sign of life, but half an hour produced no further movement, so Brian was wrapped in a towel and confined to a box while we prepared to tell the children on their return from school. At this point, I realised that Brian actually appeared to have a couple of mites on him, which may actually now be on me, so I hightailed it upstairs for a very sad hot bath and to wash my hair in vinegar, sobbing noisily at the loss of this magnificent bird.
The children were informed. A funeral was duly planned, by them - complete with order of service and invitations. It was a funeral as dignified and ceremonious as befitted such a wonderful creature. I have been hunting through my photos for the snap I was sure I took of Brian's order of service, but I can't find it. Suffice it to say - and I report this with no small amount of pride - that the final item in the order of service was, in the handwriting of my cheeky little bugger of an 8-year-old-daughter - "We go to the pub and get drunk". When questioned, the pair of them informed us: "It's what he would have wanted".
Anyone got the number for Social Services...?
Enjoyed that!
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