Empty nest syndrome

So, as some of you know, the inevitable happened last weekend.The chickens are no more. I got up to feed them on Saturday  morning ,  to be greeted by an ominous silence and an even more ominous pile of feathers. It seems a wily fox had managed to tunnel into their run and mercilessly dragged them out one by one under it while munching on them. Butit didn’t   even eat them properly, preferring to disembowel  each of them them and leave the bits lying around. While I know this is just what happens,  and the fact that one of them Mrs Barrington Black was one of my originals I got for my 50th birthday, which is in itself a triumph, I am surprised at how very much I miss them. I keep thinking I can still see them pecking about in their run as I look out of the kitchen window. 

To accommodate both the mourning process and nasty hangovers,   we took  to the sofa, treating ourselves to a Saturday afternoon of telly,  finding ourselves watching ‘The return of the pink panther’. The perfect choice,  given that neither of us was capable of anything too taxing and any plot too demanding. And my goodness, it delivered, starter, main course and a large pudding. It must be at least thirty years since I last had the pleasure of any of these films,  and did we think they were comedy genius then?  Well we certainly did last Saturday,  but for all the worst possible reasons, though  after two  hours of full on hilarity we had almost lost the will to live. We didn’t last  to the bitter end, but by then we couldn’t have cared less who had actually stolen the sparkling pink panther and were praying for curtains on the beige fashion wear and terrible acting. It was as if the director decided on some  gags and then did them again and again,  and then once more,  just in case you didn’t get it the first time round.  And to be honest they were  pretty lame just the once, so you have to admire his tenacity. To give you an example, Dreyfus, Clouseaus’  arch enemy keeps getting what looks like a gun out of his drawer, but no!  ho ho itis actually   a cigarette lighter, so he lights his cigarette ( can you guess where this is going?) and puts  it back in the drawer. Five minutes later out it comes again, except this time he has the wrong one and it’s  a real gun, which goes off, resulting in him appearing  from beneath his desk looking like a chimney sweep crossed with Catweazle, and so it goes for at least twenty minutes. Followed by jolly jape after jolly jape in a bar with belly dancers and false beards, cunning disguises, hotels with every conceivable twist and comedy turn involving revolving doors, overflowing baths,  bedrooms with a parrot, a hoover and the hapless Inspector C. Can you possibly imagine  where the parrot ended up? It was a challenge to our sore heads.

Perhaps we have just become jaded in our middle age,  and our sense of humour is now too  sophisticated for such obvious unsubtle high jinks,  though Fawlty Towers still makes me roar with laughter and it is every bit as predictable,  so that can’t be strictly true. Perhaps it is because we have watched it so many countless times that it is part of our growing up , feels comfortably  familiar,  and reminds us of times when this sort of thing was pretty much all we had on television. And in comparison to others of the time like Steptoe and Son and Rising Damp,  Fawlty Towers  is surely worthy of an Oscar. Then again, we had never had the pleasure of programmes like TOWIE or that hideous programme where people choose their dates by looking at their naked bodies so I guess it’s all relative. 

And returning to the poultry theme, the good news is that I have found a place that sells point of lay chickens barely twenty minutes away from where the narrowboat is moored up. And the even better news is that we will be going to the boat for the bank holiday weekend. 

Watch this space.