Waiting For The Man

On Saturday I got some chickens. Yesterday I got my first eggs. Today I'm waiting for the henhouse to arrive.

Yes there's nothing like doing things out of sequence when you've decided to rehome four ex battery hens.

The sun is shining and it's a lovely day for putting up a chicken coop (self assembly required, although it should come flat packed). Unfortunately the daylight is only going to last for another three hours so if the Parcelforce man doesn't arrive soon then the chickens are going to be overnighting in the tool shed again, which isn't ideal for them or for the tools they're roosting on and, shall we say, 'dropping' on.

Hens produce a lot of guano, you see. I toyed with buying a house in Norfolk once that had a long garden which backed onto open fields. I was put off it by the fact that said fields were a wintering point for a particular species of goose, some 4,000 of which were inclined to congregate in said fields and each producing fresh droppings every 20 minutes. If the geese stayed for a month that was 4,000 geese times 72 bowel movements a day times 30 days. If each dump produced 20g of goose poo - well, that's a lot. And since I didn't have any confidence that the geese would respect the boundary between my garden and the farmer's field, I didn't pursue the idea of buying this former railwayman's cottage, in splendid rural isolation with only three other cottages and a level crossing for company, any further.

Anyway, back to the hens. There are four of them, like I said, and they have tentatively been named Jolene, Angie, Penny and Shirley. Jolene is so named because she has a limp and leans when she walks. The others have acquired their names because my ex wife suggested they be named after women in song titles. So Angie is a Rolling Stones girl, Penny from Penny Lane by the Beatles and Shirley is named after the Billy Bragg song Greetings To The New Brunette. Quite apt, really, considering their colour.

Now where is that Parcelforce delivery driver?