Home And Away: 'Perfumed chickens are fine for us, but ferrets would be a step too far'

The Malvern Autumn Garden and Country Show at the vast Three Counties Showground; all human life is there. It is five years since we last went, and I remember my 10-year-old daughter Eleanor looking around in wonderment and saying, "It's like a town." It was, too, and still is. More than 60,000 went last weekend, which is roughly double the population of Malvern itself. The show even has its own gyratory system, and just like a medium-sized town, there's a right and wrong side of the tracks. There was a very dodgy-looking chap hanging out by the portable lavatories.

I went with my sons, Joe and Jacob. Eleanor is now 15, and the show no longer represents her idea of fun. It would be an exaggeration to say that she would rather spend three hours having root-canal treatment, but only a slight one. At least she'd be lying down.

The boys too, in all honesty, found that after an hour or so their enjoyment was beginning to pall, but then we discovered the produce tent, home to prize-winners in the National Vegetable Society Midlands Branch championships. In the world of showing vegetables, big is beautiful. We marvelled at carrots the size of coshes, and especially admired the 609.87kg champion pumpkin. Again I recalled our last visit, when I wrote down the name of a pumpkin-lovers' website on a scrap of paper and then fretted that, were Jane to fish through my pockets before shoving my trousers in the washing-machine, I would have to explain the hastily-scribbled words 'bigpumpkins.com'. Anyway, this year's champion was a whopper of scarcely believable dimensions, and all credit to its proud parents, Frank and Mark Baggs from Dorset, for somehow getting up the M5.

What a story of human dedication and endeavour there was, incidentally, in that simple sign 'Grown by Frank and Mark Baggs of Dorset'. And it was replicated all over the showground, not least in the display of vintage engines, all industriously throbbing away for no purpose except to satisfy their devoted owners, which was purpose enough. The Malvern show is a celebration of Middle England at its eccentric best, and I don't know how can anyone can fail to thrill to the sight of an elderly man in a cloth cap wedged into a picnic chair behind a sign saying "Mid Glos Engine Preservation Society", occasionally looking up from his newspaper to cast an adoring eye over his thrumming Ruston-Hornsby Class XHR (1929).

Meanwhile, in a tent just yards away, the stalwarts of Fert were proselytising for all they were worth. Fert stands for the Ferret Education and Research Trust, and is the finest acronym I've come across since my days on a local newspaper in north London, when a woman with a cut-glass accent phoned up and announced imperiously that she represented Phaff – Primrose Hill Against Flash Floods.

Inevitably, Joe and Jacob asked if we might take a ferret home with us, but I ruled that six chickens, two dogs, two cats, two turtles and a goldfish was enough to be getting on with. Half an hour later I had changed my tune. We were in the poultry tent, and I was rather taken with a handsome pair of welsomer hens, priced £15 apiece. A few months ago, a fox wiped out our flock. We decided to rebuild it with more emphasis on productivity and less on pulchritude, but welsomers fit the bill on both counts.

The only question I had for the breeder was whether the new additions were likely to get on with our four black rocks and two speckledies. Apparently, this is a question asked more and more now that poultry-keeping is a middle-class pursuit. A friend told me the other day that, when she introduces new chickens to her flock, she sprays them with perfume to keep the others away. By the time the off-putting aroma has worn off, they've all forgotten that there are new arrivals to peck on. If I follow that tip it will make me more of a laughing-stock in the King's Head than I already am but, on the other hand, a splash of Eleanor's Maybe Baby under each welsomer wing would serve her right for not coming to the Malvern show with us.

My friend Paul was in his native Derry recently, in the café of the city's venerable department store, Austins. At the next table a genteel Englishwoman called over the teenage waitress and said, "Could you tell me what kinds of tea you have?" The girl looked at her askance. "A pot for one," she said, "or a pot for two."

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