Meeester Nik

Two weeks, eh? Time flies. And so do the chickens now. Their new home has given them back their wings and now they positively flap around the place, stretching out their feathery arms in ways they never could before. Not if they didn’t want to slap one of their sisters in the beak, anyway.

And how do they repay you? Gerry crapped in my pocket. Not so nice. I was holding her under my left arm, wearing the green chicken coat with the big flappy pockets and she just dropped one out of the back end, scoring a direct hit. Wouldn’t have been so bad had I not forgotten about it and put my hand in there a couple of hours later.

Nonetheless we still both want to add to the flock. I want a Lavender one, and Rich wants blue eggs, but we’re going to have to try and be good and hold off; we want decent age gaps between them all so that when the older ones go off the boil the younger ones are still healthy layers.

So what have you missed? Well, not much, really. Most of my blogging these days is happening over on Blagger, and the monthly growth proves it. This time last year I was getting 30 or so hits a day. Now it gets up to 1500 and it’s actually paying its own way in advertising (despite the fact it trips its bandwidth limit every month and I have to frequently upgrade to a more expensive package).

At home, I think we’ve both revelled in life getting back to normal. We didn’t have a single weekend since the beginning of the year with nothing planned but this weekend, finally, we do. The flat is sorted – as far as it can be from our point of view – and most of the boxes and bags in the house are either unpacked or safely stored in the loft, and we can start thinking about the things we want to do, rather than the things we need to do. I’ve bought a cheap second-hand bike in need of some TLC which I plan on using to learn bike maintenance. At the moment, though, I’m falling at the first hurdle as I can’t get the pedals off. Fortunately dad is back from France for a while as of tomorrow, so he can help.

And it’s springtime at last.

Woke up on Saturday morning with the lights still on, two cups of tea by the side of the bed (with the bags still in them) and no recollection of having got in and gone to sleep. Spent the next two hours trying to sit or lie very still and stop things from hurting. Not easy when you have a hungry cat jumping around the duvet waiting to be fed.

We’d been next door the night before for drinks and nibbles. I’d been expecting us home by 23h (we’d set out at 20h) but in the final analysis it wasn’t until some time after 01h30 next morning, after copious quantities of fish and playing with the cats. And wine, hence the sickness.

Now normally waking up like that would be nothing more than unpleasant, and ordinarily you’d want to sit somewhere cool with a mug of coffee until it all wore off, but after some delivery cock-ups we were due round at Galleywood to pick up our new chicken compound. And compound it is. Rich drove (my legs were shaking) and when we arrived we found half a forest-worth of timbers, supports and cross-beams, all strung together by a heavy-duty mesh to keep out the foxes.

We’d borrowed a big white van, but even that was too small to fit it all in and we ended up driving it back across town, in loose convoy, with the back doors tied closed with some old brown rope.

It did, fortunately, make it all the way, and with a lot of heaving and hoing we managed to get it unpacked and round into the garden, by which point we’d pretty much sobered up and noticed we’d skipped breakfast.

Sadly we didn’t get it built due to a drill deficiency, and now it’s all sitting propped up in the back garden waiting for next weekend or the one after that when we might have time – and the tools – to build it.

One thing’s for sure, though – 12ft by 8ft is a whole lot bigger in real life than it looks in an online shop.