Stella

This is Stella. On 7th September 2011 Stella hatched along with three sisters and several brothers, I forget now how many. They had been lovingly incubated by Sepia, daughter of Martha and Boris-the-horrid-cock though the eggs we put under Sepia were the produce of Mrs Parker-Bowles and Henri. Although we have a long and well documented dynasty of poultry we have never had a bird reach its fifth birthday and so we had hoped to spend the day having a hen party.

But the neighbours had other things in mind. They had planned to leave on Thursday getting up early and catching the first sailing of the day but they were now beginning to realise that for B to get A up and dressed that early in the morning was not possible so would I please find out what the alternative sailings were and get back to them. This I duly did and the second sailing of the day would arrive too late for them to catch the internal flight to Athens. OK, we will go to the mainland and get a taxi from there. So then we had to find a taxi on the mainland who was prepared to drive the vast distance from Volos to Athens and also get back to the early morning taxi and tell him not to come at 7am but 10:30 instead. By the time this was all sorted out A&B had gone for their afternoon nap so we had to return to explain it all to them at 6:30pm. We didn't bother to tell them about a later sailing that goes a more direct route and would require a shorter taxi ride at the end because anything new or different causes unbelievable anxiety.

What mystifies me is how they managed to book their aeroplane tickets by themselves.