“A five! A perfect five!”

Posted on by JonnyB

Short Tony gives me a very satisfied look, like an Austrian who has just refastened his trousers having made a careful and contented tick on his clipboard against the words ‘Timmy the Dog’.

“You didn’t plant any in there this morning, did you?” he adds, anxiously.

I assure him that I did not. Five eggs!!! That is exactly one per chicken. Productivity is going through the roof.

I glance round at my new Egg-Skelter (R). This is a marvellous device for storing your eggs, and keeping track of which ones are freshest. It is overflowing with eggs. There are eggs piled up everywhere; on the table, on the surfaces. My kitchen is like Eggs ‘R’ Us. If I opened the wall cabinet, eggs would probably cascade out in a humorous fashion, burying me under a pyramid of them like the Tribbles in Star Trek.

I think the problem might be that I don’t eat eggs very often.

I should have thought this out more. If we are getting five eggs a day, divided by Short Tony and I, then that is seventeen and a half eggs per household per week. A quick burst of mental arithmetic reveals my usual weekly egg consumption as one (fried, with breakfast at the weekend). I have been coming up with new egg recipes, such as scrambled and hard-boiled, but I think my chances of raising my consumption by a significant factor are slim.

I have already given a half-dozen to Len the Fish. When you have chickens, giving people eggs is the most neighbourly thing that you can do. Unfortunately, Short Tony turned up about a minute later, with another half-dozen for Len the Fish. Len the Fish is now sick of eggs. I have given some to the other neighbours, but there are still loads left. I sense that what was once a neighbourly thing is going to turn in to ‘oh God here comes bloody Captain Egg again; pull the curtains and pretend we’re out, or vegan’.

The LTLP is getting a little tired of Egg Surprise for her dinner when she gets home; I am finding it increasingly difficult to populate my dinner parties. I am grateful to the chickens for their continued efforts, but if they could – haha – hahahahaha – ‘lay off’ – haha – a bit then I would not complain.

I have a long hard think.

Posted on by JonnyB

The spring rays of evening sun trickle down on the Village; chirping birds dwarf any noise from the road. I gaze out on to the front garden, in a reflective mood.

None of us have been very well recently, with a cough. And we are very tired, as the Toddler refuses to wait until the rabbit clock opens its bright bunny eyes before waking up and expecting us to be entertaining. Plus I am sure that I am approaching a crossroads in my life.

The thing about crossroads is that you can either turn left, or you can turn right. Alternatively, you can go straight ahead, being sure to give way to traffic from the left or right (depending on whether you are on the major or minor road). The problem is that if you stop to think too much at the junction, then a man in a lorry behind you will start hooting, and after a while perhaps get out and punch you in the face. (For the purposes of the analogy there is no safe place to pull over off the road, as there is a high wall on both sides and no pavement/layby etc).

It is a dilemma.

I start worrying that the LTLP might be getting a bit eccentric, as I wander outside to take the chickens their pudding. Yesterday she was in a well-to-do establishment, and retired to ‘freshen up’. It was only after wondering for ages why the toilet paper was on the other side of the room that she realised that she had performed her ablutions in the bidet. She has been working very hard recently, and I hope that she is not losing it.

“Here you go, chickens!” I offer, setting the pots down. They seem to have enjoyed their asparagus. We chat a while before I retire back towards the house.

‘I would do anything to make the LTLP’s life a bit easier,’ I think to myself as I scrunch across the gravel.

Smoke starts curling up around me from my pants.

I waft it away irritably. Spring is coming. We need to relax a bit more.

The bowls season begins!!!

Posted on by JonnyB

The smell of the fresh-cut grass; the ‘clunk’ of the colliding woods; the gentle and friendly handshakes at the end…

I have looked forward to this moment all winter. Things have gone a bit tits up with various professional stuff recently, and I have been a bit stressed out an’ stuff, and there is nothing quite like a relaxing game of bowls to ease one’s mind back into the pleasures of the English countryside.

“And so I started chasing… well I sort of went after him,” I explain later to the Police Sergeant, choosing my words carefully. He glances at his Constable for support. “I have to say I was pretty pumped up.”

Big A nods in agreement. “That’s when we rang you.”

The Police Sergeant alternately shakes his head and shrugs. “I can only apologise we weren’t there sooner,” he offers. “If we’d have got the message from Control…”

Nobody asks me what I was planning to do if I’d have caught the chap. I cast a nervous eye at my bag, which contains four very heavy bowls woods.

No official action is taken.

I receive an alarming telephone call!!!

Posted on by JonnyB

“You’re in the Mail on Sunday!” gibbers Big A.

I am taken aback. Fearing some sort of expose regarding the chickens, I hurry over to his place to investigate…

Hm. I drop a note to John Wellington, who is the Mail on Sunday’s Managing Editor. It reads:

‘Dear Mr Wellington,

On page 74 of the March 16th issue of ‘The Mail on Sunday’ you published a 392-word piece headlined ‘Blog of the Week – Adventures of a family man who gave up his high-powered job and moved to rural Norfolk’.

The piece (in its entirety) consisted of copyrighted articles lifted without my knowledge or consent from a website for which I am the registered owner…

[bit more blah, yours sincerely, etc.]’

Not having worked for the Mail on Sunday before, and a stated wordage figure proving elusive, I pluck a conservative amount out of the air and stick it on the bottom of an invoice, and send the lot via the kind auspices of the G.P.O. along with one of my stern-looking address labels. To the Mail on Sunday’s credit, they pay me my two hundred quid quicker than most biggish companies would, and John Wellington sends me his (what I am sure are sincere) apologies.

There’s nothing quite so Rikfromtheyoungonesesque about people with blogs getting on their high horse about print journalists, except perhaps print journalists getting on their high horse about people with blogs. Clearly, however, there’s a little bit of a mutual-understanding issue here. I always go for cock-up over conspiracy, but one paragraph of his reply to me does seem a bit… a bit not quite fitting in with what I thought things were about.

‘We generally take the view that blogs published on the internet have already been placed in the public domain by their authors and, in case of amateur writers, most people are happy to have their work recognised and displayed to a wider audience.’

Discuss.

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