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Tales Of The Country: the intellectuals of the chicken world

Brian Viner
Thursday 28 November 2002 01:00 GMT
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Dr Geoffrey Eley's definitive text, Home Poultry Keeping, has just supplanted the Rothmans Football Yearbook on my bedside table. As much as I have entertained myself during bouts of insomnia by committing to memory Everton FC's biggest-ever FA Cup victory (11-2 vs Derby County in the 1889-90 season), I am now a home poultry keeper, with even more important stuff to learn. For instance, I learnt that if an egg-bound bird is given some olive oil, "she will usually expel the egg within a couple of hours". Whether ordinary olive oil or extra virgin, Dr Eley does not say. Either way, I take very seriously my responsibilities to Babs, Ruby, Ginger and Marigold.

At least I think that's what they're called. During our journey home with them on Sunday, they were, at various stages, named Amber, Bunty, Edwina, Poppy, Daffodil and Treasure. We let the children decide, although if one of our birds had been a cockerel, I would have pressed strongly for Egbert. When we came to live in Docklow in July, we quickly became very fond of an old Muscovy duck who waddled imperiously – if a waddle can ever truly be described as imperious – around the old cider press outside our back door. The kids christened him Egbert, which seemed to me a wonderful name. But then one day I found myself chatting to Mr O, our predecessor here, who has converted the old barn into a splendid new house. Egbert waddled by and we both looked at him fondly. "The children call him Egbert," I said. Mr O's smile slipped slightly. "Actually," he said, in a tone which brooked no argument, "his name is Desmond."

So the name Egbert is still going spare. But we were advised by the nice people at the Wernlas Collection, the rare-breeds centre in Onibury, Shropshire, that as novice poultry keepers we should probably stick with hens. We were also advised, this time by the man who delivered the hen house, that we shouldn't add an ordinary red hen to our four bantams, as banties, as he kept calling them, are bright little things, while ordinary reds are, in his uncompromising words, "complete dingbats". I guess it would be like shutting up Frank Bruno with the panellists of Have I Got News For You.

We ordered our hens a couple of months ago, but it has taken until now for them to be sexed. We have three Buff Rock bantams (Babs, Ruby and Ginger, I presume), and a Gold Seabright (Marigold). The three Buff Rocks cost £15.90 each and the Gold Seabright £18.70, which will doubtless cause much hilarity in the King's Head, where I was offered some bog-standard birds for 50p each. They were going cheap, the chap said, and I obliged him with a chuckle, though having met him a couple of times subsequently I have a feeling the pun wasn't intended.

Anyway, in keeping with our hens' stature as expensive rare breeds, we have given them the mother and father of all hen houses (£248.50 from Forsham Cottage Arks in Tenbury Wells, and the same model, it says in the brochure, as that supplied to Channel 4's The Big Breakfast). It certainly seems secure and comfy. It even has a staircase, recommended by the man from Forsham Cottage Arks because "banties like going upstairs to bed". I wonder what they do when they can't sleep? Read the Rothmans Football Yearbook, I shouldn't wonder.

The capital pleasures of dressing up

With apologies to my colleague John Walsh for trespassing on his turf, or at any rate his Tarmac, this is a tale more of the city than the country, for recently Jane's parents looked after the children while we revisited London as tourists. And in celebration of a rare weekend alone together, we not only pushed the boat out, but pushed it out with a firework display and 21-gun salute, and checked in for a night at the Savoy.

It was odd, very odd, returning as sightseers to a city we know so well. We had matinee tickets to see Glenn Close in A Streetcar Named Desire at the National Theatre, and time beforehand for a quick sarnie in Covent Garden, where in rapid succession we encountered two Chelsea Pensioners and a Pearly King and Queen. It was as if the London tourism gods were looking benevolently down on us from Mount Olympus. Or Primrose Hill. By the time we'd passed a beggar with a three-legged dog, and a car being clamped on Waterloo Bridge, the London sight-seeing experience seemed complete.

Not that I want to knock the metropolis. Glenn Close was simply fabulous, darling, and so was the Savoy. And a dash to the theatrical costumier Angel & Berman offered a reminder of something else we lack in the country: wigs. We had been invited to a party in the sticks to which everyone was required to wear a wig, and Leominster and Ludlow being conspicuously lacking in wacky headgear shops, we thought we'd wig up along Shaftesbury Avenue. But by the time we got there, Angel & Berman was closed.

The party was last Saturday night. In the end I wore a borrowed Elvis wig that had rather lost whatever bounce it once possessed, and my barnet felt decidedly inadequate alongside the startling Mohicans and luxuriant King Charles IIs. But at least I turned up, unlike an acquaintance of the hostess who is thinning rather dramatically on top. She is still worried that he might have been offended by the request to please "wear a wig", not realising that it applied to everybody.

A century to remember

On Saturday we went to Ludlow Castle for a the fourth annual Ludlow Medieval Christmas Fayre. Calling fairs "fayres" is a bit of a bugbear of mine, but the medieval theme rather excused ye olde English usage. Moreover, it was about as fine an example of a medieval fayre as you could wish to find this side of the Battle of Agincourt, with at least as many people dressed in doublet and hose and sackcloth jerkins as there were in sweatshirts and jeans. There were lots of men in suits of armour, too, which caused at least one little boy some confusion. "Look mummy," I heard him say as the umpteenth knight clanked past, "there's the Tin Man again".

All those who took stalls had to wear medieval clothes, which posed no great challenge to the company specialising in "mirrors in Dark Ages style". But there were plenty of others who had dressed up for the sheer fun of it. I asked the chap in charge whether he was a member of a dressing-up society.

"Oh, I'm in lots of societies," he told me, proudly. "I'm in The Plantagenet Society and quite a few others. I do re-enactments of the 14th, 15th and 17th centuries." I asked what was wrong with the 16th century? "Nothing much happened," he said dismissively, of the century of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

It is some consolation, I suppose, as George Bush plots his war against Iraq and Osama bin Laden decides where next to massacre Westerners, that at least we live in a century worthy of future re-enactment.

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