56

Today I am 56, my 2nd birthday in Ireland and my first in the "new" house. We made a bit of a weekend of it with special meals both Saturday and Sunday. Yesterday we invited Mentor(s) Anne and Simon over and Liz cooked up a rather superb supper. Being all chicken keepers this has to be fitted in around 'bed time' for the birds, and with the evenings being now bright till around 7 pm, that means rounding up your birds by about 7.30 pm and socialising after that. The new hearth tiles are now fixed in place with their glue dried, so we were able to light a gentle fire in the main fireplace - it looked very good with the shiny hearth tiles reflecting the light from the flames. Our starter was a pomegranate and goats cheese salad. Main course was an 'Elizabethan Rabbit' recipe from the "Two Fat Ladies" cookbooks served with our own home made naan bread (Madhur Jaffrey recipe). The rabbit was actually one of the progeny of Anne's late buck Peter and our own doe Padfoot (late as in 'since sadly taken by a fox') which was rather nice. Pud was a chocolate mousse. We seemed to crack through a bit of Rioja and French red between us and the chat ebbed and flowed, taking in a fair amount of the recently deceased Maggie Thatcher and the Savita Halappanavar Galway Hospital case, till way gone midnight. Effortless and very enjoyable entertaining in lovely company. Thank you very much for coming, Anne and Simon.

Today we are just 'en famille' with no visitors and Liz is back in action creating a delicious potato-cake breakfast in which I get to eat the 2nd of our latest 2 goose eggs, with lunch as home made soup, coffee breaks featuring lemon drizzle cake and Dorset apple cake and a steak supper. Spoiled I am. I get a rake of birthday greetings through social network site 'Facebook', some cards, a superb (if not that tuneful) rendition of 'Happy Birthday to You' over the phone first thing from the assembled Silverwood Choir (cough), a more tuneful rendition later from Diamond and a lovely phone call from Pud Lady. I am taking a day off the pond-digging mainly because it has finally rained so my gardening is restricted to sowing seeds in pots, trays and tubs in the poly tunnel. The rain seems to have changed the appearance of the grass overnight and local farmers breathe sighs of relief that they might get some grazing for their cattle after all. Careful what you wish for, guys! I have clipped all three dogs, instead and very neat and summer-cool they look.

Meanwhile, in an exciting development in the poultry department, we have a goose (or geese) in lay. The photograph might look like a pile of hay but, trust me, it is in fact a hay box containing the start of a clutch of eggs. Let me explain. We were getting a bit concerned that the geese did not seem to be laying any eggs, although to be fair it was frosty most mornings and that awful NE wind had been whipping through for almost 3 weeks. We had even seen the gander 'treading' at least one of his ladies. Seeking advice from the  poultry discussion forum on the internet I was advised that if the geese were getting 'seen to' by the gander then they were almost certainly either laying or would soon start. Search through the hay in the hay-box and delve into the wood shavings, they said. Geese are pretty good at hiding eggs.

Goose eggs (Simon told us) stay viable for quite a long time while the goose accumulates her clutch at a rate of an egg a day or every 2nd or third day, trying to amass 12-14 eggs before she will go broody and sit on the clutch. So the next morning I headed for the goose house to let them out and to rummage and delve, but was presented with an egg in full view in a lovely cup-shaped, goose sized depression in the hay in the box. There proved to be a 2nd egg under the hay, so we collected both for use in the kitchen but then resolved to see if we could manage a clutch. All this had happened over night, quietly and with no drama from the geese.

The next day (now yesterday) that all changed and we seemed to move into a new format and level of excitement. We noticed during the morning that the geese were all hanging around the goose house door and waddling in and out of the house with much honking and noise every time the three got separated (by one being inside or outside and not visible to the others). It seemed this was the first time they had ever done anything other than as a threesome - they are normally glued together as a group, find one and you found them all. This separation was obviously stressful stuff! Eventually they sorted themselves out and Goocie sat on the box of hay while Gander and Goosey took them off a small distance to graze while Gander continued to honk and shout every few minutes, as if to reassure the sitting goose that he was still around. I went off to dig pond and after a half hour or so, Goocie emerged from the house and waddled over to find the other two.

Liz and I waited till they were safely out of sight and sneaked a peek into the house. At first we thought there was no egg but, no, there was indeed and egg but so carefully hidden under hay pulled across the top that it was invisible from above. I noticed in the evening when I went to round up the geese that Goocie went into the house and straight over to the hay box where she poked about checking that the egg was still there. We hope this means that she is now in 'accumulating a clutch' mode, so we have left that egg intact and will wait and see. There were no more eggs over night or today. Anne and Simon tells us that we may need to try to separate the 2 females if they both start nesting as they can hassle each other and start interfering with each others' nests, stealing or breaking eggs etc. This might have practical problems in our set-up; we'd struggle to fence the two halves of the family apart but still give them access to all their other needs and the gander, so we are just keeping a watchful eye. We will cross those bridges when (and if) we come to them.

Happy Birthday to me. I am told it is also the anniversary of the Titanic hitting the iceberg; that happened not long before midnight on the 14th and Titanic sank on the 15th. So now you know.