Personal

This is the true story of how a bantam cockerel learned to rule the roost after fleeing for its life.

I’ve written before about the chickens I used to keep, and about how they got red spider mite and how I cured them.

After I treated them with the medication, a neighbour said I should get a cockerel to stop the pecking starting again. So I went to the market and bought a cockerel and brought it home and lofted it over the wire fence into the chicken yard.

Except that I had bought a bantam cockerel (a white one) and my chickens were Rhode Islands and they were twice the size of the cockerel. So when the cockerel landed in the chicken year, it took one look at the chickens and they looked at it and then they just launched at it.

The cockerel took one look at them and dived under the ark, terrified.

A small digression for those who don’t know what an ark is. it’s a wooden shed on wheels that can be dragged around to fresh grass. At one end is the door for the owner to get in and out to clear it out.

At the other end is a box running the width of the ark with a lift-up lid. That is where the chickens lay their eggs. Inside the ark is a branch running crosswise, and the chickens roost on that at night.

Now in fact my ark was static and I had staked a high wire fence around it so that the chickens had a permanent patch of land to grub about in.

And the iron wheels had settled a bit and there was just a small space between the bottom of the ark and the ground. And out of this space the cockerel poked its head this way and that.

This went on for a while, with the chickens darting in when they thought they could get a shot at the cockerel, and I was getting a little agitated myself, because the chickens had a pretty mean look in their eyes.

Then the cockerel saw its chance and it darted from under the ark and scrambled vertically into the air and landed on the ridge of the pitched roof of the ark. The chickens were never able to do that – they were too plump, or maybe they weren’t adventurous enough. Whatever it was, the cockerel had a respite but only a temporary one, as it couldn’t stay up there forever.

And sure enough it flew with a mighty fluttering leap, right over the fence where it landed and then ran to the bottom of the garden, down into the little ditch that bordered the garden, through the straggly hedge and up the other side.

On it ran, across the field and down the ditch far away and up the other side and into the next field, and soon it was lost in the distance.

Late afternoon turned to evening and I went inside with a rueful feeling of having been pretty stupid not to have foreseen that a cockerel half the size of the chickens might have had a hard time of it.

The next morning I went out to the chicken run and there was the cockerel strutting around, and he had all the chickens treating him like the prince he was.

And I have thought and wondered sometimes what went on in his mind that evening.

I imagine him roosting in a hedge somewhere out in the fields, panting and bedraggled.

How did he know that he was supposed to be back with the chickens?

Did he sit there saying “I am not going to be defeated by a bunch of chickens – I won’t be able to live with myself if I turn tail and run now.”

And when he reappeared by the fence and leaped into the air and over the fence and in among the chickens, did they try to mob him or did they stand stunned and in awe at his audacity and bravery?

These are things I will never know.

This is a true story.

I’m trying to find out the name of a play that I saw on TV about two or three years ago in the UK.

It was a re-showing of a much older performance. The original may have been made for TV or it could have been a filmed performance of something that was originally a stage play.

The setting was a ‘civilised’ party with the hosts and with guests that arrived and interacted.

I would say it was set in the 1960s – in an apartment or house with contemporary furniture – an aspiring middle class setting.

It maybe had an American feel to it – like it was set in the USA – modern apartment – maybe not.

From memory, the whole play may have been silent – as in no spoken words – just gestures and expressions or perhaps the characters mouthed words.

We get to see into the psychology of the individuals – jealousy, fear, arrogance, disappointment – all of it under a veneer of civility.

The way people moved around in it, it was almost like a ballet – the whole thing was very styled and unnatural, yet insightful and realistic about the inner workings of how people interact.

It was almost balletic, very mannered – the way people turned and gestured and took their coats off and offered and accepted drinks – and through all that, the real inner cruelties, jealousies and disappointments were visible – attempted to be hidden but seen by us the audience – and sometimes by the other characters.

I asked what play was that, on Metafilter, but no one knew.

If you know the name of the play, let me know.

A nice thing happened some years ago when my then wife and our children were traveling through France. 

We were on an autoroute heading south, and we sped along, passing through the various toll booths. And each booth had a plastic hopper into which drivers throw coins to pay the toll.

The plastic hoppers made the process of going through the booths much quicker. The machine would total up the coins, and if the amount was correct, it would whisk the driver through.

So my wife and I would sort through our coins and collect whatever was needed, ready for the next toll booth. I was driving a right-hand drive car so I was on the ‘wrong’ side to reach into the hopper into which to throw the coins. So my wife would throw the coins into the hopper and off we would speed to the next toll booth down the autoroute.

My younger daughter was very young at the time, perhaps three years old. She was intrigued with the way we deposited the coins, and asked whether she could do it at the next toll booth.

I remember so clearly her standing on the back seat and reaching over the front passenger seat with the handful of coins in her hand. And she threw them. But somehow we had misjudged what she had understood of the process. And instead of throwing the coins into the hopper, she simply threw them out of the window.

We were low on coins and there was a line of traffic behind us impatient to get through. So we had to get out and scrabble about on the ground for the lost coins. I didn’t think of it at the time, but I wonder what my daughter made of that.