Broody chickens, a landmark age and not doing what I said I was going to do. . .

OK, first things first, before we get to the broody chicken. . .

I had my 60th birthday a week or three ago. I wasn't entirely happy about it. It's all very well going around saying "But I don't feel 60!" (as if you knew what the hell 60 was supposed to feel like in the first place), but the truth is, however un-sixty you feel, the big fat 6 in the number is an inescapable fact. It denotes six whole, full decades. That's a lot of decades to carry around with you ;-) It's significantly different than "In my late fifties". 60 is REAL. So forgive me if I don't go 'whoopee doo' and jump around. . . What I shall do is acknowledge it, bow politely in it's direction and then get on with my life.

The thing is, when I was a kid, 60 was OLD. . . Nowadays it's just a kind of late middle age. . . There is no mitigating sense of achievement on having reached this much celebrated landmark, well, not much of one anyway. I can't help that feeling that the significance of getting to 60 years of age has been somewhat overplayed. You could say that the significance of being 60 is the thing that is getting old, not me. . . ;-)

Actually I feel fine about it now, but it is hard not to absorb the general received wisdom and see it as the beginning of a slow descent rather than a continuation of an upward curve. Who knows, I could have thirty or more years of living, breathing and playing with bits of polymer clay yet to experience. . . But hey, we're all here to experience what we get to experience, and we can take it in good heart or we can moan about it. I'll go for the former. Hasn't done me any harm so far. So let's see how it goes eh?

Anyway, back to the sheep, as the French say, apparently, except they say it in French, one of our chickens is spending most of it's time sitting on its, and the other two chickens' eggs, and not coming out to forage and suchlike. It's very disinclined to move even when pushed or pulled. It gets positively grumpy, making unfriendly chicken noises and fluffing up it's feathers. Apparently it's 'broody'. This can last for 21 days I'm told, (via google) but can be curtailed by rather harsh measures such as shutting her outside the chicken coop for long periods etc. Not sure how to proceed. probably I will just hope she snaps out of it at some point. The eggs won't hatch, as no rooster was part of the equation, so there will be no closure of that kind for her, and anyway I'm still going to take the eggs away, so it has to run it's course. The lady from the farm up the road said her dad used to just chuck them in the pond when they got like that, which changed their attitude somewhat. I can see how it might. You can tell we are out in the country can't you? ;-)

As for not doing what I said I was going to do, well, that was a polymer clay bead making reference to my last blog post in which I said that I was going to wind down with the faux ceramic, pot like beads and the crackly stuff. Yeah right. OK, obviously that was fake news. Sad. Evidently I carried right on messing around with them.
So shoot me ;-)

Jon x