A Mass of Odds and Ends

No doubt if my sons decide in the future to go into therapy much will be made of their mother comparing them to chickens. This morning, after making myself as unpopular as possible at a celebratory bar breakfast in honour of the beginning of the (all too short!!) summer holidays by mentioning the words “project”, “something constructive” and “useful” in the same sentence, both sons disappeared upstairs despite the glorious day outside. I decided to find pictures of our young chickens enjoying the great outdoors, perhaps gambolling amongst Aldo’s salad plants, or practising their wings from the lower rungs of a ladder, but they too were indoors. I hadn’t realised that the adolescent imperative to avoid sunshine and open spaces affected fowl too.

The mother of the chicks has had enough. It could be the rain (we’ve all had enough of that - Italy isn’t used to rain, so just forty eight hours and our electricity has gone off, making freezers sound alarms all night and now men in raincoats are rushing about trying to find the short circuit caused by an excessive amount of water) or the nine chicks are behaving like adolescents, or perhaps it’s the memory of freedom and the lustrous crest of the cockerel just the other side of the fence. She dallied about six foot up on the top of this pole until the desperate chirping from below reminded her of her maternal duties. 

I’m not sure if there are many career openings for hen photographers, but I’m in training anyway. I follow this lot around, a persistent yet incompetent papparazzi, taking photographs a split second too late, failing to capture things like the way one of the small yellow ones keeps hopping up onto its mother’s back. It’s difficult enough constantly counting them to make sure there are still nine, let alone photographing them. Rereading that sentence I realise I am probably spending more time than is healthy in their company.