The secrets of chicken soup

Catherine Chicken is sickly. She has swollen up like a barrage balloon with an evil face and dinosaur feet. She lumbers about. It is peritonitis, the vet says, after I make my husband drive her to the animal hospital in Falmouth. She will not recover without an implant that prevents her ovulating. Chickens are ever in danger of reproduction, like human women, and that is why I find them so touching. They are feathered paradigms. (There is a novel on this called Brood.) They counsel implants on the chicken welfare site — they counsel deification on the chicken welfare site — but it’s £250 for a chicken that cost less than a tenner, and my husband is from a farming family and says he couldn’t live with the shame. So, I let her out of the idiotic only-for-Londoners Bauhaus-style run. I want her to die in a garden, not a cage, whatever Defra may say.