Posted by: Scribble | 11/08/2008

Run Chickens Run!

I am in a state of nervous jumpiness.  Not because I am still worried about my Teen, (see post below) who is starving in New Zealand, no.  Though no mother ever escapes worrying about their children in one or way or another, so that is a perpetual niggle that has made it’s nest comfortably in the back of my mind as opposed to the nervous jumpy one at the fore.

The nervous jumpy one is as a result of the constant squawking from the loud mouth Cockrel.  It started yesterday morning when I heard a cacophony of noise outside and leapt up to see what the problem was.  When I got outside, there was no one in sight, chickens that is.  They had all scattered in different directions and I assume the nasty Mr Fox has been back for a visit.

Unable to find the chickens I leave it for a while.  I can hear the loud mouth far off in the distance possibly  coming from the direction of the churchyard which lies behind our garden.  As all the weeds have grown back I can no longer see into it.  A little while later, I peer out of the window and spy two lads hiding under the Yew hedge.  I know they are safe.  I wonder where Flo is as she is rather pathetic and my fears grow as I see Speckle, her adopted mum running frantically along the path under the window looking for her, (they do lokk funny when they run)!.  I really hope the fox hasn’t got Flo

Flo with new babies

Flo with new babies

 as she has been so hard to look after, what with being abandoned and brought up by the confused Daddies who the fox eat last time he visited.  In the back garden, I see one black hen with the three babies but I can’t see the other black hen who is always with her.  I decide that she must have been eaten this time as she is nowhere to be found. 

I go inside to break the news to The Other who is disappointed too.  “There’s only one thing to do you know”, he says.  “What’s that then”?  I ask.  “Well, we need to put a damn great sign round ‘loud mouth’s neck, saying, ‘I am a loudmouth, please eat me'”.  I have to laugh at this.  It is quite true that the fox always gets the hens.  The Cockrels whom we really don’t need, always run off and leave the hens.  Very naughty as they are supposed to look after them.  But then, imagining myself in their place, I think I would run too.

So at bed time, I look in the chicken shed.  It has been pouring with rain all afternoon and inside I find a sorry looking group, all wet and miserable and subdued.  I’m about to give them a sypathetic talk about the loss of black Henny when I spy her snuggled between two of the lads up on the perch.  Oh what relief!  She must have run away somewhere and returned later, unnoticed.

This morning, however, all the chickens are very nervous and this is what has made me nervous-jumpy.  I let them out fairly late as it is Sunday and they are entitled to a lie in as well, (which in fact they hate, but I like).  They come out gingerely and I warn them not to stray too far out of the garden.  Don’t they know that Mr Fox waits in the same place?  Duh!  They immediately take off to the back of the garden, far away from Mr Fox which is a good sign.  But – all morning, loudmouth has been shouting his head off.  Oh I could ring that neck of his.  I realise he is only doing his job, that it is his place to warn the others if anything untoward occurs, he is afterall top cock, having taken his natrual place in the pecking order, what with the other three being eaten.  I find myself leaping up every time he shouts.  I look out of the window thinking that Skinny is terrorising them as she quite often does, but when I see her, she is lying in her bed which she has taken outside into the sunshine as she does each morning.  She looks at me all innocently for she knows I am about to accuse her but this time she is not to blame.  It is clearly a case of the willies.  Loudmouth, having failed to protect his brood, is really overdoing it this morning.  I hear you loud and clear, you numbskull, pea brain.  Shut up, before I have a nervous breakdown!

Leave a Comment

Posted in Chicken Shack, Humour, Life | Tags: , , , , , ,

Posted by: Scribble | 09/08/2008

Teen Troubles – Abroad

I haven’t had a very good couple of days.  I was talking to my elder Teen on MSN as he is miles away in New Zealand and after quite a long time, it became clear that he had spent his wages for the week, his car got a  puncture, he was down to his last $6 and had run out of food.

To be fair to him, he did not actually call me for help or to even tell me of his troubles but as I am Mum, I can detect when all is not well even when thousands of miles away and I wheedled out the details.  Being a Teen and living in a house share for the first time, he has not yet learned to budget properly, though it could be genetic, since I have never learned this fine art either.

I considered my options.  I could send him a cheque but that would take over a week to get there and would then take another week at least to clear the funds.  Really, not very useful at all when you are down to $6 dollars and there is no food in the cupboard.  My next idea was to ‘wire’ him some money.  I’ve seen this done in films and it always looks incredibly easy.  I open up my online account to find that you can’t ‘wire’ money to a foreign bank online, apparently.  I trot off to the bank, armed with the Teen’s bank details.  And here is where we hit one of several annoying problems.

Firstly, and contrary to my expections – still feeling like someone out of one of those films I mentioned, I find that there is a humongous form to be filled out which I am unable to do, since I do not have a couple of bits of information.  The couple of bits of information are numbers which the Teen has to get from his bank.  They are secret bank numbers and cannot be found on a bank statement.  I am getting very anxious at this point.  Part of the problem is that when it is day time here, it is night time there and there is a small window of opportunity when the Teen can call his bank and then me with the information.  Worse, the cost of this little bright idea to ‘wire’ some money will be approximately £40.  Well I think so.  It will cost me £20 and a similar fee debited from my Teen’s account which is empty anyway, though I do have the ‘option’ to ‘pay all fees myself’ by ticking the appropriate box on the form.  It is such an exhorbitant amount for what, in films is a real easy thing to do, that I am outraged.  I was only going to send £100 which is in fact quite a lot for me as I have a weeny income and to think, that on top of that we will have to almost half again in fees. It’s pretty hefty and out of proportion to the amount being sent. It is of course a ‘standard fixed fee’.

I walk out of the bank in disgust and reluctantly resolve to send him the cash in an envelope, though this will take ages to get there and might be pinched in the post, when I suddenly have another idea.  I remember that the Teen has an account at my bank which he was going to shut down when he went away but at the last minute we decided to keep it going.  Could he somehow access the money in New Zealand if I put it in his account here in England?  I go back into the bank, relieved that I didn’t have a tantrum earlier and mention this idea.  There is a really lovely guy in the bank who always takes the time to chat to me and  who knows my Teen.  He even waves to me when he cycles into the countryside near my house.  I get him on the case.  I mention that the Teen didn’t think he could use his account in NZ since our bank doesn’t have branches out there, where he is staying.  He tells me that the bank, have an ‘arrangement’ with other banks who allow customers of other banks to use their cash mashines.  Bingo!  Only I remember that we cut up The Teen’s card when we thought we were going to close the account.  ‘No problem’ says Barry.  ‘You can order another one to be sent out to him’.  Phew!

Sadly that was famous last words.  I ordered another card for him but they insisted that they could only send it to our home address and not to NZ.  I explained that The Teen was not living here, he was in New Zealand, but you might as well talk to the dog for all the difference it made.  Like a dog with a bone, the ‘voice’ repeated for the umpteenth time, that the card ‘must be sent to the address it is registered to’.  Furthermore, The Teen needed to download and print off a form, (he has no printer) and send it (going to take ages, I am thinking with frustration) that tells the bank he will be using his card abroad, incase they think a thief is using it unlawfully. By this time I am in tears.  I think of my poor Teen out in a strange country, out of food, out of love (his girlfriend dumped him), out of everything.

I call Barry, the lovely guy at the bank.  Bless his heart!  Hearing my strangled voice, close to tears, telling him my Teen is starving and out of money, he calms me down and tells me he can sort it all out IMMEDIATELY over the phone.  All my Teen has to do is call a number later, to tell them, on the phone, (no forms) that he is in New Zealand and he will be able to use the card.  All done and dusted.  You have no idea the people I had to speak to, the machines I had to speak to and all the forms and numbers I was supposed to fill in (fraudulently of course, since I am not my Teen) that I have had to put up with today and yesterday.  Fingers crossed, his card arrives and he can actually use it and all will be well.

Reflecting on this sorry state of affairs I couldn’t help thinking that it is damn funny in this day and age where technology is so advanced, that the banks are so woefully far behind.  My cynical self tells me that they are not in fact behind at all. They just pretend to be.  We all know that with a couple of clicks of a mouse, funds can be transferred to anywhere.  Why the huge fees?  We all know that there are gremlins inside the banks’ computers that fire off automatic letters if one goes just a teensy bit overdrawn and last time I checked, they weren’t sending out bank employees to deliver anything on foot.  So why the huge fees.  What does it really cost for those bean counter gremlins to AUTOMATICALLY, without human intervention, send a letter out/send funds? Not surely the princely fee of £30/£40.  And why is it, that since they really do only have to press a couple of buttons, I have to fill out a contract size form, to send my Teen some money.  I would have thought, that equipped with the name of the bank, the name of the account holder, the account number and the sort code, I should have been able to ‘wire’ my Teen some money without any further ado.

Hope he appreciates it.

4 Comments

Posted in Grumbles, Private Lives, Random | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: Scribble | 07/08/2008

Stormy Weather

Wow!  There’s an enormous thunder storm going on.  There was one last night too.  The entire night sky lit up with sheet lightening and deafening thunder followed.

I love storms.  I find the lightening fantastic to watch, an awesome sight and the tremendous sound of thunder that sometimes shakes the house, quite scary, but in a good scary way.  The animals hate it of course and it is easy to see why.  They don’t know what is happening and it must seem like some giant monster is coming to eat them up or something.  Skinny, the Whippet, being only a year old, has never experienced such a storm and was alarmed initially.  She started whining and wondered around in a restless way, unable to settle anywhere.  She followed me everywhere and leapt up into my lap when I sat down, smothering me and poking me with her gangly legs and elbows.  I tried to be very relaxed about the storm so she would feel calmer and surprisingly, before long, she was asleep and not really bothered at all.  Our cat on the other hand, who is now eight and has been through many storms and fireworks has never got used to it.  She’s had a difficult time one way and another.  She came to our family as a dear little farm kitten from nearby at about the same time as Skinny’s predecessor.  Puppy and kitten got on fairly well, though people told us that the dog would eat the cat.  It was in her nature and breed to do so, they said.  This turned out not to be the case, as fortunately, one day when the pup poked her nose into the kitten’s business, the kitten biffed her one right across the nose, claws out and the pup was very wary ever afterwards.  The same thing happened with the chickens.  The pup attempted to chase the hens and the Cockerels pecked her hard on the nose and she left them alone from then on too.  All was working out quite well really since the ducks also pecked her.  She was properly put in her place.

 

Unfortunately, though, as the kitten and pup grew up, the dog who was now bigger, started to chase the cat.  The dog had her bed near the cat flap and each time the cat attempted to go through it, she had to pass the dog.  There would be a frantic race between them, the cat hoping to escape through the flap and the dog hoping to get there just before.  They never actually came to blows thank Goodness, but the cat started to get very nervous and spent more and more time out of the house.

 

I felt very bad about this.  The cat is quite the most delightful cat I have ever known.  Whenever we go for a walk, she will come with us and behaves more like a dog, but surreptitiously.  We might be walking in the nearby churchyard for example and will look around to see the cat perched on a grave stone or peeping out from behind the Yew tree.  But she always comes with us one way or another.  She also talks to you.  She really does.  When I come down stairs in the morning I usually say hello and there follows a conversation between us about what she wants for breakfast, remarks about the weather and so on and all the while she makes noises in answer.  Quite extraordinary.  She’s a real chatterbox.

 

And then the dog got some sort of cancer aged five and we had to put her down.  After that, the cat, which had almost moved out suddenly had the run of the house.  It took her a while to realise that the bane of her life was no longer with us and she would creep very quietly around looking to see if the dog was behind the sofa or in one of the arm chairs.  Sometimes she would sit on the threshold of the sitting room until she was quite sure that there was no dog anywhere around, before quietly and carefully coming in.  We didn’t get Skinny for a whole year after the dog died and during that time, the cat became bolder and bolder, confidence at a supreme level until one day I brought home a tiny pup.

 

Poor cat, she was absolutely appalled.  She wouldn’t come into the house again, slept on an old sack right on top of the oil tank in the spidery, cobwebby shed outside. Her fur smelled of oil and was grubby looking and unkempt. I was so distraught to put her through all this again and I felt I had betrayed her.  I know that if I had said to her, ‘hey cat, what do you think about us getting another dog’?  She would have said, ‘not on your life, it’s me or the mutt!’  It took ages and ages, months and months of living rough in the oil shed and the garage, nights spent huddled in the straw, before she finally, tentatively started to come back inside.  The shame of all this, was that by then, the pup was firmly established.  She had not had her nose biffed and been put in order and she wasn’t scared of the cat.  She found her a source of amusement, annoyingly playing with her tail and sticking her nose where it wasn’t wanted.  But gradually, painfully slowly, the two have reached a working, living relationship that works for both – just. 

 

On occasions, the two actually play together.  The cat sits on a chair; the dog grovels on the floor in a mock scaredy cat fashion, eyes looking up soulfully just before leaping upwards.  The cat will then swirl around on the chair, stretch her arms cunningly under the seat and launch a swift attack with an upper cut from the left and then right.  It’s so funny to watch.  Once the cat has executed this move she sits up straight, licks her paws and looks down on the dog with utter contempt and boredom as if any further play would be thoroughly beneath her and the dog sidles off.

 

The storm however is another matter.  The cat wants to sit near me, under the table but the dog, jealousy personified, will not allow the cat more attention than herself and chases her off repeatedly.  I scold her but it makes no difference.  So while I love the storms, they cause a bit of a storm in my family.

3 Comments

Posted in Private Lives, Random | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Categories