Eggsactly

There are many advantages to living in the sticks, and this is one of them! I purchase my still warm, free range eggs twenty meters from my front door! The "shop" is a very rustic wooden garden chair with a box perched on it and a cardboard sign stating EGGS FOR SALE. Inside the box nestled in a very artistic nest of straw are the eggs, a cup, and a note reading " Eggs for sale, £1 for six, please help yourself!" And I do, regularly!

The eggs are produced by a brood of the craziest looking chooks I have ever seen. Chickens of every size, colour and level of neurosis cluck around this farmyard .There were, at one stage, about thirty hens, and the shop was regularly stocked with eggs of every size and with colours ranging from almost pure white, every shade of brown to the most exquisite pale greeny-blue. Then disaster struck! A few weeks back, an unruly Hound took temporary leave of his senses and murdered a large contingent of the chickens. Only five little nervous hens now scratch around the farmyard.

On the bright side, I have been reliably informed that one clever bird not only managed to escape capture, but also laid her eggs out of reach under the shed. (Do not ask me how this feat was achieved) She has hatched out a new clutch of chicks which are being molly coddled into adulthood, and thus the shop has been saved by one canny chook, and I will continue to count my eggs before they hatch.