Give Us A Break

To all the other fantasists planning an early exit from paid work: get ready for endless toil.

- Greg Dixon

I think the Prime Minister might be broody. For a whole afternoon, she sat unmoving, staring bleakly into the middle distance, and brooking no visitors. She was still there, looking beady, when we went to bed. And when I went to check on her in the morning, there she was, brooding. Poor dear.

The fact that Jacinda, one of our four evil chooks, had chosen to do this in the one laying box – there is a choice of three – that all but one of her sisters like to use, too, caused no end of trouble. Or, as I call it, the “book effect”. All afternoon, her sisters protested outside the coop. Booooook-book-book, they chanted. Booooook-bookbook-book-book. The same loud complaints woke me the next day – at 5.45am.

I consulted our chook-rearing bible, the internet, on what to do with a broody hen. Evidently, they can be dangerous; they lash out with their beaks; wear gloves was the advice. And they can endanger themselves. Sitting for days on an unfertilised egg that will never hatch, they can starve themselves to death. Poor things.