I was coming back from doing some shopping in town recently and decided to pick up the CB radio mike and let my wife know that I would be delayed as I was stuck in traffic in a known and unavoidable traffic blackspot.

Me: Calls wife’s callsign

Wife: I’m here

Me ‘Hi (wife’s callsign). I’ll be back in about ten minutes. Fair bit of traffic here’

Wife ‘(my callsign) OK…But we appear to have a chicken related problem.

Me: ‘What sort of chicken related problem?’

Wife: ‘All the chickens are OK and Laughing Boy is OK, but I’m going to need an urgent bath’

I finally managed to get through the traffic in a state of being both intrieged and somewhat concerned about the ‘chicken related problem’.

I got home and went inside my home to find my wife wearing a wet chicken shit spattered t-shirt and shoes with our rather wet eight year old son.

It transpired that our son had gone into the layers’ run to collect eggs but had left the run door open therefore allowing the hens to scatter in all directions around the garden. Wife and son then set about gathering up the hens and putting them back in their covered run. The chickens were excited to be exploring the relatively newly laid lawn and any bits of compost and earth that were around.

My wife asked our son to help gather up the chickens but it was at this point when our son decided that what this situation needed, more than anything else, to improve it was water, lots and lots of it. He went and turned the hosepipe on and sprayed it all around the garden and I do mean all around the garden, he sprayed the hose everywhere, including my wife. with the hose on both ‘jet’ and ‘shower’ settings. Eventually nearly all the chickens bar one was gathered up by either picking them up or tempting them out of their hiding places and back into the run with Chicken Crack aka Dried Mealworms. But one chicken would not budge. It refused to be bribed with Chicken Crack and didn’t stir. It was more than happy where it was.

The sudden and very unexpected downpour caused the recalcitrant chicken to make a dash for freedom from her hiding place. It was a case of ‘chicken exit stage right -pursued by wife’. My wife managed to catch the chicken and held her in the appropriate way. But the chicken was pissed off, so pissed off in fact that she let loose a massive chicken shit all down my wife’s t shirt and shoes.

The chickens, all of them, had put away safely and the water turned off by the time I got back and parked up and I could easily see why my wife had made the plaintive call over the radio about the emergency bath requirement.

No chickens were harmed in this incident, even if some of them did get a little damp. But for my wife’s shoes however it’s not that good an ending. Her shoes needed a deep clean to remove the faint odour of chicken poo.