Change of Address

Hello, it's Hulanicki, guest blogging again, but oh my goodness me, where do I start? 

For the past month I’ve been a refugee in my own garden, shunted from camp to camp at the dead of night and waking up at dawn, holed up in another less than desirable accommodation.

It started around the time Mary set up a blind date for the cockerel. We all got up one morning to find the new girlfriend presumptuously making herself at home in the coop. To be honest, she looked rather drab, (I thought Mary was more discerning), plain brown feathers all out of alignment, a pale face and a limp comb. I could see she’d got potential but I’d definitely have to give her some styling tips.

However, once we got chatting over breakfast and she’d explained her grim lineage I really began to warm to her. Her entire life, to date, had been spent shut in a barn with hundreds of other hens popping out eggs regular as clockwork. 
At one year old she’d been spared the impending journey to the dog meat factory because Mary offered to give her a home. She’d been singled out as the best looking bird in the flock; most of her friends had barely any feathers left at all! 
Well, of course I felt dreadful now, to think I’d called her drab!

For the next few days I really enjoyed hanging out with my new friend and showing her all my favourite nooks in the garden. Johns Junior the cockerel was pretty chuffed too. So, happy families. Until, horror of horrors, a greedy mean-eyed fox slinks up on us one fine afternoon and with a snap of his jaws snatches Johns Junior from under our beaks. Panic, where to go, what to do. In the time it took the rest of us to leg it back to the coop there were two more casualties.

So, that was the start of our incarceration. Mary didn’t dare let us out at all now. After a few days I was beginning to understand what my new brown friend had been through. I suppose in hindsight it’s given us a real bond. 

A few days later we suffered the indignity of being shoved into the catbox and transferred to the empty dog kennel. Mary thought we’d appreciate the small concrete run. Well, ahem, I’m not a dog! 

She must have heard me complaining because knock me down with a feather, a week later, she’s fenced (watch out it gives you a nasty jolt if you touch it) off a lovely big patch of grass between the house and her studio. There are daisies twinkling in the sunshine, some lovely long swishy grass full of bugs and beasties and some dappled shade under a ginko tree. It’s heaven! I don’t even mind that we’re in temporary
accommodation... the rabbit hutch is quite cosy for four.

Mary says she’s going to move our coop down from the orchard eventually but it’s very heavy and she needs some help and anyway at the moment she’s too busy looking after her husband who’s just had a new knee fitted, or something. I don't know, men and their gadgets!

Hmmm, I suppose that’ll move us right down the pecking order for a bit! 

Mid summer madness

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; 

to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”  Henry James

Well, it’s curious how an English summer’s afternoon can be so blurred at the edges, that water, sky and shore become murkily indistinguishable... but in their own way beautiful.

And rest assured, if you're in Orford, the café overlooking the harbour does a very good Macchiato.