by Alan Duly

Created on: June 10, 2008

The chicken

He was an average man with a loving stay-at-home wife and two teenage children. His life was boring and so routine, his work was stressful, and worst of all, he really didn't make enough money for the four of them to live a comfortable lifestyle. He was hard pressed to be able to keep his cigarette smoking indulgence and an occasional sip of scotch. If an essential light bulb blew in the house, there were never any spares, so one had to be borrowed from a lesser area. Toilet paper was often "apropriated" from his work place, and we all knew and suffered from that because the Government issued stuff was really rotten and scratched your tender areas.

There were several reasons his wife did not go out to work, one reason was due to his pride, another was that there would be someone home to greet the children when they returned home each day from school. Probably the biggest reason was that he luxuriated in never having to be involved with the mundane tasks of housekeeping or cooking, and indeed he really looked forward every day to that home cooked meal always on the table just as he opened the front door every evening. Then there was the added bonus of having a willing sympathetic listener for all his stressful and other experiences during the day at the office. She was very good at saying "yes" and "no" at the appropriate time. She was a superb active listener that he could "dump" on every day.

One day, while reading the paper, he saw an advertisement for the opportunity to make money with battery hens. These hens could produce low cost quality eggs and therefore could be very profitable if there was a suitable outlet to sell them.

Inquiries were made and it was arranged for the wife to collect from the local fishmonger every day, all the offal that he produced (fish heads and intestines etc). This and a suitable corn based meal was the food supply taken care of, except that the wife not only walked to the fishmonger's and home every day, but it was her additional chore to cook up this fishy mess until it was soft enough to be put through a manual grinder and then mixed with the corn meal.

The garden shed was converted into a chicken house with the addition of some benches about 3 feet high, and the batch cages were installed, like a long line of row houses. The cages were about 2 foot by 2 foot by 2 foot, and therefore not really enough to allow the chicken to turn round, and they had a wire floor and then an under floor usually covered in newspaper

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