How many cocks are there in Cornwall!!!

Three weeks ago we decided to get rid of our chickens... I put this advert in the blog and at about the same time my domestic assistant put an advert in the Cornish Guardian.

A day or so later I advertised the chickens in the COAST email newsletter and, as this post notes, I was inundated.

Last Thursday Pete’s dog, or maybe a fox, ate one of the chickens, leaving one to a good home.

On Sunday we gave the last of its kind to Paul. A good home, in the country, where a loved hen should be.

My lasting memory of owning chickens isn’t waving good by to the little lady in it’s rustic idyll, it will be the blitzkrieg of phone calls I have had today about the fricking chickens. The Cornish Guardian went live and dropped a hen-bomb on my telephone. By 8.00 am when the first call came in, I thought the impact would be minor: a small crater in my day’s time, of an equivalent magnitude to say, a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses turning up at your door, or a kettle breaking. But no, this was a big one.

I started off all nice, but as the dawn grew into the morning my mood with these… these… these lunatics changed. I became colder and shorter until, by midday, I was answering the phone, “Hello the chickens are gone!” in one prolonged breath.

It gets worse. By the late afternoon I was a zen-like automaton. Almost composed…Until I went through the answer machine. It was full to its digital brim.

I started deleting messages laboriously. Press 1 press 3. Press 1 press…..

And as I was this zombie, I thought, “But they will keep calling. And this will get full again….”

And so I stopped.

I left a silly message for the callers,

And left the phone off the hook.

Be very very careful selling hens in Cornwall.