Look how we suffer! We have to keep eating these damn cakes . . . .
You have to read yesterday’s post on chickens first . . .
Here are this morning’s eggs. Despite the near-freezing cold, all four chickens have laid! The test is: can you identify which chicken laid which egg?
When you think you have worked them all out, click on the photo and the answers will be revealed!
Four fine eggs - but which chicken laid which egg?
We’ve had our four chickens for well over three months now, and they’ve become thoroughly embedded in our life. Val has commented on how they’ve changed our early mornings (Musing on Rising). Even more evidently, they’ve altered our diet! I know it might seem obvious, but chickens do produce a lot of eggs – and you have to use them! The first ones seemed really precious, and I still feel that they mustn’t be wasted. After all, a chicken only produces at most one a day – and it’s hard to be really casual about something that seems to be the whole purpose of an animal’s life.
So, we eat omelettes and scrambled eggs lots more than in the past. I’ve started making cakes, largely because they contain eggs. Egg and chips appears on the menu more often as the weather gets colder (and never seems complete without baked beans, one of the two English foods I am trying to keep in stock – the other, love it or hate it, is Marmite). With only a twinge of regret at the extravagance, I use an egg to glaze the pastry of my apple pies.
Despite my culinary efforts, we still have what the French would politely call ‘une surabondance’. We view the increasing piles of full egg boxes with a mixture of pride and horror. Our dreams of a healthy Mediterranean diet have paled in the face of this cholesterol laden eggbundance mountain. We give eggs to Lin and Pete, we offer boxes to villagers we meet, and still the middle shelf of the fridge remains stubbornly egg-laden.
I think the problem comes from the immensely focused nature of the chickens. Their life only takes meaning from egg laying – and they pursue with an intense determination all that is necessary to achieve their destiny. Having said this, they show their drive in varied ways, because chickens are not all the same, indeed we see more and more differences between our four. While they may be not complex enough to have what we call a personality, they truly do each have their own ‘chickenality’.
Big chicken (her name is self explanatory – as Val explained in an earlier posting) is the most dedicated egg producer. Since we started keeping full records of the egg production (once again, Val’s obsessions are coming in handy!), Big has failed to lay on only two days out of 100. By any standard, that’s impressive! But of course, it comes at a price – for the other chickens. To keep up her fantastic production record, Big has to eat regularly. And plentifully. And this means she has to push the other competing chickens out of the way if there’s something tempting on offer.
If you go down into the chickens’ area during the day time, they spot you coming well before you open the gate. From all corners of the garden, they converge at top speed towards the ‘food temple’ – a simple construction made out of breeze blocks under which they worship the food gods. Big chicken is fastest and straightest. She hurtles across vegetation and rocks, like a veritable ‘eat-seeking missile’ (© Val). She (literally) throws herself into the food on offer, without even stopping to consider what it is, and whether she likes it. Truly a driven woman! And heaven help any chicken that she sees as an obstacle or – even worse – a rival. Hen-pecked shows its true meaning!
Close behind Big in the production stakes, with an 81% record, is Other Chicken. Originally named for her lack of identifying features, Other has continued to be somewhat undistinguished. She is, in many ways, the epitome of second-best. This is not to say she is in any sense inferior – it’s just that she’s not the best in any field . . . . . except . . . . trumpet noises. She’s the Louis Armstrong of our flock, with an instantly recognisable sound. She wanders around, trumpeting incidentally as she goes, proclaiming the virtues of mediocrity.
Pretty Chicken is undeniably pretty. She has a two-tone died blonde plumage style and in a human world she would be the butt of endless (deserved) Essex girl jokes. In the chicken world, she is just bottom of the pecking order. She lays attractive, slender, pale eggs, with the lightest average weight (48g – yes Val is that obsessive! I bought some special scales for her to weigh the eggs accurately . . . ) Only a 61% laying record – but not bottom of that heap.
Our worst layer, Naughty Chicken, is also my favourite. She’s the one who knows how to get out of the fence, and she can occasionally be found off on expedition across our neighbours’ land. She’s the one who killed the snake. She’s the one who terrorised Val in the early days by climbing on top of the hen house and threatening to jump on her back. She’s the one who happily pecks wheat out of my hand (ouch!). She may only have layed on 34% of days, but they are lovely large dark brown eggs. In a simple productive sense, Naughty’s probably not economically viable . . . . But she is beautiful and brilliant.
Chickens make excellent pets. Even without the eggs, they would provide endless entertainment. They also kill weeds and pests, while digging over the soil with their scratching. I really wish I had kept some in Derby. I want to persuade everyone to have some chickens of their own. Come on, you know it makes sense!
I am in cold, wet Derby at this moment, on a very brief visit to see my children. I woke up early this morning, and was pleasantly surprised to find a tiny sprinkling of snow covering the shed roof and garden bench. As I sit here now with my 8.00am coffee, looking out of the window at the soggy, bedraggled garden, the sleety rain washing away the snow and turning the day into an icon of the typical English November, I am struck by two surprising observations.
Firstly, on both my mornings here, I have found myself awake and wanting to get up early, even before sunrise, even though there were no chicken chores driving me on, and even though I had absolutely no reason in the world to get out of bed before midday. I woke up with a feeling of being glad to be alive, and wanted to get up immediately to greet the new day and whatever it would bring my way. There is a palpable sense of possibility hanging in the air that I breathe these days.
Secondly, the sight of the white dusting on the garden in the morning gloom made my heart leap, ever so slightly, like a nostalgic echo of those moments in childhood when the first snow of the year heralded the onset of cold, winter play-times and the flourescent-lit approach of Christmas. Even as the sleet transforms into oh-so-uneventful English rain, dropping from the leaden sky like old-fashioned wallpaper in a house of memories, I feel inexpicably joyful and at ease.
So this is how my day has started, and I am happy. I have nothing else to say about it. I just wanted to share the moment.
A couple of days ago, we looked out of the kitchen window to watch the dawn leaking across the sky from the horizon, and noticed movement. Lots of movement. Fourteen of the newly built wind turbines were functioning.
Having followed the development of the ‘parc des éoliennes’ over the last 9 months, we were excited to see this baby of renewable energy drawing its first breaths. It’s strange how quickly we have become accustomed to the sight of the new turbines on the hill. The majesty of the current development makes the original row of eight turbines seem insignificant by comparison. But to see them moving adds altogether another dimension to the experience.
It is hard not to imbue the turbines with animate characteristics. They seem so alive. And having stood directly beneath one in full flow, it’s impossible not to be struck by the sheer power and scale of them. Hearing the wind churning in their wings above you is not unlike the experience of sitting next to a huge waterfall. The sound they emit is the sound of wind against solid strength, somehow they feel organic.
It is therefore surprising how little they can be heard from the village. We’ve always noticed how a change in atmospheric conditions can affect the sounds as well as the appearance of the valley. Things always sound different at night, or first thing in the morning. Standing out on our terrace on a cool night, when all the creatures are quiet, and everything in the valley is hushed and still, you can sometimes hear the distant pulsing shhwuumm, shhwuum of the turbines.
It sounds like the beating heart of the hills.
OK I admit it. Sometimes it takes me a really long time to get to the point. But bear with me – we’re nearly there.
So where were we….
I’d created my Intention, planted it out there in The Universe, and now I was sitting, waiting for it to grow. According to Steve Pavlina (oh, how I wish he didn’t look and sound quite so…so… All American) the next stage in the process of Manifesting Intentions is what he (somewhat irritatingly) calls “Alpha Reflection“. According to this, within 24-72 hours of putting out a new intention, I should experience the alpha reflection. This is the validation that the intention has taken hold. Apparently this often takes the form of a very noticeable synchronicity. Sometimes the synchronicity will be part of manifesting the results; other times it may just be an acknowledgement that the intention was received.
Why people so often feel the need to invent fancy jargon to describe simple processes is beyond me. Let me attempt a Plain English translation….
I create a vision of what I really really want, and then tell the Universe to “make it so”. Within a few days I’ll start to notice little coincidences and such-like, related to what I’ve wished for. These might actually be the start of the dream coming true, or they might just be little messages from the Universe to let me know my wish has been noted.
Nothing new there then. We’ve had this sort of thing happen before, (neighbours knocking on the door to offer us land to use, for example) so we sort of know how it works. Of course, I hadn’t completely filled Simon in on the details of my recent ‘conversation with the fairies’, so he was a little more surprised than I was when an email from Frank (remember Frank?) appeared in my Inbox a couple of days later. Frank said that they’d run into a bit of a hitch with the house they were buying, which may or may not be resolved, and were thinking that if our house was still an option, it might help them to sort things out.
Cue lots of Serious Thinking and Serious Talking. Frank wasn’t saying they definitely wanted to buy our house, but even before we responded to his tentative enquiry, we had to talk about what we would like to happen. We fairly quickly agreed a theoretical position which, after all, was where we’d already got to the last time I’d (belatedly) emailed Frank to say we might be willing to sell.
A few days, and quite a few email exchanges later we found ourselves having to say a definite yes or no about whether we would sell our house in Roquetaillade. Although very loathe to give up everything we have here, I had already pretty clearly stated my intention to the Universe a week ago. I hadn’t specifically said I wanted to sell this house – merely visualised the sort of different life I wanted to have, and left it open to the Universe to decide how this might actually come about. But Simon had a bit of catching up to do. (Note to self – next time I make a wish, maybe I should mention it to Simon first?)
Sometimes though, you have to ask yourself just how many times Opportunity has to knock on your door before you let it in. This was now our third chance to sell this house to Frank and Phil. We have our dreams. They have theirs. And somehow our fates have become inextricably intertwined in the fabric of the Universe. To say No now, and close the door on this chance to more fully realize our dreams would surely be perverse in the extreme.
So that was it. We said Yes. Yes to Opportunity. Yes to the Future. Yes to the Unknown. We have organised things with the Notaire, and arranged for all the pre-contract house reports to be done. And we have committed to signing all the papers and moving out of the house in the Spring, even though, as yet, we don’t have anywhere to go to. Sometimes Life is like a parachute jump. You just have to open the door and make the leap. And hope that the Big Guy in the Sky has packed your parachute properly.
