I recently purchased a magazine which carried a free one inside subtitled “All you need to know about keeping chickens” such a battery of fowl knowledge would have left you with not much change from a fiver, had it not been given away.

Its sixty page guide to the simplest example of animal husbandry in the history of mankind would leave the brains of most would be chicken keepers completely scrambled.

Advice ranged from vetinerary care to food supplements from choosing hybrid or traditional breeds, from types of feeders, drinkers, housing, egg cetera

egg cetera.

There were no less than nine eggheads offering specialist advice in this increasingly complex science of putting an egg on the breakfast table.

By the time I had laughed my way through the magazine I found myself lost in a daydream where a chicken over six feet tall was walking across the garden and in the distance was an egg three feet across both having the potential to feed the world’s starving in one go, but what really cracked me up was an ad for an electrical contraption that automatically opens the coop door to let the chickens out; presumably when you have become too bored to bother with your new venture into the “good life” I wonder which came first the conman or the sucker?

David Otter