When I was nine, parental illness had resulted in benign exile with an aunt and uncle, who'd let me keep a flock of bantams and battery hens with limp and naked bottoms. Over 20 years later, my wife started saying 'You'd like to keep chickens again, wouldn't you?', which really meant she liked the idea as long as I cleaned them out. And so it's proved. But I don't mind, and I do like them, because they're an individual bunch.
For the sake of the neighbours, we had decided against a testosterone drenched cockerel shouting the odds at 4 am. This meant that Elvis, and fellow inmates, Bossy, Edith and Psycho (the bird formerly know as Wimpy Chicken) faced a life of spinsterhood. We wanted to rear some chicks so when Wimpy became broody we bought six fertile eggs and borrowed a maternally inclined bird from a neighbour.
We put them both in splendid isolation, split the eggs between them, and waited. Wimpey sat doggedly on her nest, red faced and furious, squealing primitively and lunging at my fingers. For the first fortnight she wouldn't move at all. I'd put food and water near her bedding and received such a good beaking for my pains that we re-christened her Psycho.
She would have died protecting her eggs, and this made us unreasonably fond of an animal, who in other circumstances, we might only known as lunch. Anyway, after three weeks, her near desperate determination paid off. Two of the three eggs hatched. Meanwhile our borrowed chicken (a feathery dinosaur called Fanny) failed to hatch anything and went home in disgust.
Psycho's parenting skills are excellent, and her offspring, Saten and Bald Bird - who isn't - are well adjusted, although they do like to be tickled for reasons, that, frankly would be illegal in Texas.
Are we proud of Psycho? Oh yes, tediously and expansively so. It's amazing we have any friends left.
