I blink in surprise.

There is never a knock on the door these days, let alone at this time in the morning. The weather outside is foul; I have only just woken up the chickens to let them out into their escape-proof run, and am looking forward to a nice cup of hot coffee.

I open the door. It is Mrs Short Tony, announcing that the chickens are escaping.

Being a man, I really am no good whatsoever at multi-tasking (I do not think that it is sexist to say that). Therefore there is some comfort in the fact that I am able to combine my reaction at her news with some much needed practice for next week’s National Face-Falling Championships.

Stomping outside, I find Short Tony grimly banging in nails. The wind howls pitilessly through the trees. The chickens peck around innocently.

“I caught them sitting on this fence,” he explains, indicating a piece of fence that is surely too high for chickens to get up to. I look at the chickens. I look at the fence. To be fair, we had identified it as a Point of Potential Weakness, but had assumed that they would not be able to jump that far.

We spend the next bitterly cold hour raising the height of the fence by two feet.

I am learning all the time about this chicken business. So far, I have hung up a washing line for them to use, and constructed a useful Perchomatic 3000 out of old bits of wood. I do not see why they would wish to go elsewhere, and am a very tiny bit hurt by their attitude.

The lady asks us over her shoulder, heading towards a bunch of sleek, befeathered show-hens.

“No,” we affirm, absent-mindedly.

The lady bypasses the show-hens with a cackle, and veers towards the deepest depths of the shed.

Shortly afterwards, Short Tony and I are speeding back along the A-road, a half-dozen chickens confined to the dogg cage on the back of his truck.

We discuss our new family, thoughtfully.

“We should decide a few things. Are we going to give them names?” he muses.

“I hadn’t really thought about that,” I reply.

“Maybe we should leave that to the kids.”

“Let’s be clear, though,” I say, resolutely. “No comedy names. Like Gregory, or Princess, or Livingstone, or Ganley. And no bloody post irony, like when people call their cats Chairman fucking Miaow.”

“Fair enough. Can you still see them?”

Short Tony is looking at the rear-view mirror in some alarm. I turn to peer through the glazing at the back of the cab. No chickens whatsoever are visible. I undo my seatbelt and strain my neck. There is no sign of chickens. I have a brainwave and remove my phone from my pocket; reaching up as far as I can, I take a picture through the glass into the base of the load area.

The result is inconclusive.

“I’d better pull over,” mutters Short Tony, indicating for a lay-by. We hop out anxiously and hasten round the back. Six chickens peck away at us from the security of the dogg cage. We are relieved. I give a weak smile to a lorry driver who is staring down at us from his parking space.

“Vets?” asks Short Tony as we continue on our way.

We agree that running up a vet’s bill for a chicken is bad economics.

“And no puns,” insists Short Tony. I nod vigorously in agreement. “No ‘oooh, aren’t they egg-citing!’ or ‘This one is egg-strordinary!’ or that sort of stuff.”

We are reassured that we are both singing off the same hymnsheet on that topic, and subsequently also agree that neither of us will attempt sexual intercourse with one.

“How much were they again…?” asks Short Tony as the truck rumbles on.

“Seven pounds fifty each,” I report. “No V.A.T.”

“Forty five quid,” calculates Short Tony. “That’s a poultry amount.”

We continue the journey in silence.

“A letter box?!?” I spit.

“I’ll show you,” offers Big A.

Big A’s new chicken run does, indeed, feature a letter box. I stare at it in some annoyance. He is being ridiculously competitive about his new run. It is not even as big as mine.

“I’ve concreted the posts into the ground,” he mentions casually.

I consider lying about our own post construction, but do not wish to descend to his level. “Some of this wood looks quite rotten,” I point out helpfully, as we return through the garden. He is careful to pull the reclaimed front door shut as he leaves the run.

I bolt off home to look through chicken books. If he is going to build a run with concreted in posts and a reclaimed front door, I am determined that we will have the better chickens. I quite fancy the Transylvanian Naked Necks myself, just because they sound exciting. Either that or an Old English Pheasant Fowl. I can quite see myself owning an Old English Pheasant Fowl, and taking it for walks.

Big A is getting some scraggy old ex-battery hens. My pedegree rare breeds will put them to shame, and it will serve him right. I will be careful not to let them mix, so mine do not get into bad habits. But they can write to each other if they like.

Mrs Short Tony hands over a thick paperback. It transpires that the LTLP has been lured in to joining the Village Women’s Book Group.

I am pleased about this. The LTLP does not get out much, as she is always tired and stressed after her hard day at work. It will be nice for her to have another interest. I sometimes worry that her quite internationally-important and high-level professional role comes at the expense of the social life that she would want.

“When is the next meeting?” I ask.

“Next Thursday.”

I look at her crossly. We are meant to be playing a snooker match on Thursday and this means that I will have to drop out. It is annoying. I have been busting my guts out at home looking after the house and talking to the cleaner and making plans for the chickens whilst the LTLP pisses around with her mates in an office. I take the book and promise to pass it on.

I do not speak to the LTLP for several days, whilst she glues herself to the book. This happened with the last book she read, which was the ‘da Vinci Code’. At one point I try suggesting that she reads a few more books a bit more regularly but a bit less intently, but she tells me to shut up and make her tea and that she might take me up on that, but for men. I stomp off.

It is clear from the odd glance over her shoulder that it is a dreadful book, which has been tightly plotted by a genius and then written by a jobbing spider monkey. The descriptions are all horribly obvious, and the dialogue plumbs the depths of clunkiness.

“There is such clunky dialogue in this book that you are currently reading, which has been selected as this month’s choice for the Village Women’s Book Group,” I complain. But she is lost in her own world.

I am a literary snob. I would not expect Mrs Short Tony, Mrs Eddie, Mrs Len the Fish, Mrs Martin the IT Consultant etc. to go for Shakespeare or whatever, as he was famously no good at giving female characters identities in their own right. I should not be so judgmental. She enjoyed it, and will enjoy the literary and cultural discussion around it, and that’s what counts.

The LTLP arrives home late on Thursday evening, really pissed.

“Here you go,” I offer Short Tony.

I thumb through the book before handing it over. “She has sex here, here and here,” I explain helpfully.

It is bloody weird reading a book about people you know. I would have thought she’d have included our brief and sadly chaste time together in a lavish Brighton hotel room, or the post-pub darts match at Short Tony’s, but Petite Anglaise’s publishers seem to have insisted that she kept it to stuff about Paris an’ that. I have a part so insignificant that you might miss it, but I had to sign something official!!! Presumably so I don’t sue her. It was exciting.

I would imagine that you can get it from all good bookshops, or Amazon.

*

Reader Neil Forsyth also has a book!!! He is the man behind the funny funny Bob Servant stuff that I mentioned ages back. Anyway, this is the paperback edition of ‘Other People’s Money’, which got some great reviews when it was first out in hardback. Whilst you are in the all good bookshops you should give it a good thumbing. I do not think that Neil Forsyth has sex in it much, however.

*

Dan is banging his head against the Foreign Office wall. The pesky ‘emergency evacuation of Iraqi translators who are being systematically murdered for helping British soldiers’ thingy just won’t go away, which is annoying. The government has leapt into action and provided those in hiding with some emergency forms however; it is hoped that, four months after the first ones being hastily completed and returned for Civil Service perusal, some helicopters or whatever might arrive. Dan’s latest post about it is here. No sex is involved.

*

That is the news for now. I am thinking of taking some photographs of the chicken run and putting them on here, in order to lose visitors. Day five and it still stands.

The coop has been up for some weeks; the ‘Keeping Chickens – For Dummies!’ books are well-thumbed. We purchased building materials ages back, taking care to measure carefully and get exactly the right length of wire needed; the ground had been cleared and the chickensdirect websites bookmarked.

It is good to live off the land like this. Once I get a couple of chickens I will practically be Ray Mears.

It is possible that there have been longer building projects – the cathedral thing in Barcelona, perhaps, or the last Olympics. But it is important to get these things right. Plus we had been hinting to Len the Fish for ages that he might come round and ‘give us some advice’ which is code for ‘do all the work for us’. As it is, he agreed to turn up to help for the couple of hours that it would take us.

By day two of construction, I am feeling a bit down. Short Tony has disappeared to buy more wire, and I have been struggling for ages to hammer the same small staple into a piece of wood. Meanwhile, Len the Fish is erecting, wiring, twisting, hammering, digging, measuring and fixing.

“Thanks ever so much for your help again Len,” I mumble. I am embarrassed. “If you ever need some… ummmmm… humorous writing done, then just…”

I tail off lamely. It is shameful. Len the Fish is brilliant at everything practical. What he doesn’t know about practical things isn’t worth knowing. He has given up his entire week to do our fencing for us, and I have cock all that I will ever be able to offer him in return, apart from a pint, which doesn’t count as he will buy me one back. Despite being so powerful, I have about two practical skills in the world: I can use a patent type markup system that sends instructions via a modem to a plant in Watford that then couriers back your typesetting at twice a day intervals if it is before 1991, and I can name the local newspaper that covers each town in the UK, apart from the ones that I have forgotten.

“A pint. Just buy me a pint,” he replies, not asking me about Exeter, or Mansfield, or Leigh-on-Sea, or even giving any indication that he requires humorous writing services. I return to the single post that I have insisted on putting in myself.

“Huge gales forecast for tomorrow,” he says, not entirely reassuringly.

By dusk the run is complete. A happy home for six chickens, that we will probably purchase some time in the year 2163. Mrs Short Tony’s car draws up and she steps out.

Her jaw drops. “It’s a bit… bigger… than you claimed it would be.”

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I rest against the garden wall, looking with anxiety at the mass of the trunk. It is amazing how a tiny little apple tree can suddenly appear so solid. I scratch my head and walk thoughtfully away from it into the front garden, clutching the rope in my hand.

As far as I can work it out, things can go one of two ways. Left to its own devices, the tree will fall backwards on to the outbuilding. Whereas if I pull on the rope with all my might, the tree will fall directly towards me into the safe expanse of Short Tony’s front garden. With luck, I will be able to leap out of the way.

“Are you ready?” asks Short Tony.

“What exact definition of the word ‘ready’ do you…” I begin, but my words are drowned out by the chainsaw. He starts cutting a wedge shape into the trunk. This, I reason, should help the tree fall towards me and not backwards towards the building.

I take the strain on the rope.

I don’t know why it is. I am reasonably tall, and I have not had a shave, and I am wearing old clothes that are covered in paint and stuff from where I have done DIY in them, and I am taking the strain on a rope that is tied to a tree that is being felled by a man with a chainsaw. You would think that I would look a bit more rugged. As it is, I can’t help thinking that if a passing photography student captures the scene in order to display a large black-and-white print in a pseudy photography gallery, he may well be tempted to caption it: ‘Nancy Boy Holding A Rope (2008)’.

I do not seem to be able to get a proper grip. My feet are not spaced correctly. The tree appears to be quite heavy. I strain hard. This is not good. The front lawn is all around me – all I need to do is to stop the tree falling backwards. I can feel its weight. Stop it going backwards! Stop it going backwards!

“Almost there,” warns Short Tony.

The chainsaw slices through. I give a huge pull on the rope. The tree falls almost perfectly sideways, taking the top off the wall and coming to rest in a cloud of twigs and masonry across the driveway.

There is a short silence.

“A lot of that cement was loose anyway,” Short Tony offers, tactfully.

“Ummmmm,” I reply in embarrassment.

“Anyway, do you want any more free wood?” he asks.

Free wood!!!