Layers of industrial action

Mud, mud, mud. I slog out to the coop to let the chooks out. Mud. I trudge into a paddock to give my sheep Xanthe her supplementary feed. Mud.

- GREG DIXON

I don’t wish to frighten the horses, but I suspect our chickens have unionised. I haven’t heard them clucking The Internationale, and no red fl ag has been hoisted above the chicken coop, but the signs of industrial action are unmistakable: they aren’t doing their job.

Now, not laying isn’t necessarily a sign a chicken has gone bolshie, of course. As those who have chooks learn, the frustrating, feathered fruitcakes typically, and naturally, down tools and stop laying in autumn.

No one, not even a petty capitalist such as myself, resents this. Every one of us, feathered and unfeathered, is entitled to a jolly good break once a year. However, after the holiday, the petty capitalist expects his workforce to go back to work. With chickens, this should happen sometime around the shortest day of the year, in late June. Only it hasn’t this year.

Instead, the Prime Minister (the suspected union agitator), Catherine, Joanna and Little Linda have not returned to work. For about a month after they should have begun laying, not a single egg had appeared in their coop.