COLUMN: The hens already have names - John Lennon and Noel Gallagher

Hens are coming back in a big way! Most houses with children under the age of 12 will probably have a chicken coop or are being put under serious pressure to get one for their little ones.

These things are just fads, if it’s not decking, it’s a gazebo or a trampoline, but now it seems to be chickens.

In a few weeks, it feels good saying that, we’ll be in our new house.

Actually, given our experience of tradespeople of late, I’d like to revise my previous statement and clarify that it could be a few months before we’re in our house.

Hold on, having spent over a year building a house and with an expected move in date that at the beginning of the project was May of 2023, let me say it could be a few more years before we’re in our house.

Anyway, in anticipation of moving in, we’ve decided to get our little boy some chickens and I’ve taken to naming them John Lennon and Noel Gallagher; that’s so we can speak about them in code in front of him, talking about where we will get them, when we need to get the coop etc.

The discussions are ongoing and intense.

For his third birthday in August we’re going to surprise him with them.

It requires a fair degree of planning.

We’re getting a chicken coop bought in and we’re only getting him two.

I mean that!

We’re not going to be like one of those families that end up with so many hens they’re only two of the birds away from being a small industrial chicken farm.

Knee deep in chicken sh*t, too many eggs that they can’t even give them away, and up to their neck in feathers and vet bills from fox attacks.

I’d like to make it clear, we’re not falling into the current trend of households having chickens.

The craze that’s sweeping the country is having no impact on our decision.

My young fella is genuinely obsessed with eggs.

My brother in Boherlahan has two chickens, they’re called Tia and Maria. It’s worth noting that my brother is well into his 40s and his children are all grown-up.

So even adults have gotten caught up in the chicken trend!

Every time we visit home, Jack has to go up and pick-up Tia and Maria’s latest batch of eggs from wherever they’ve laid them.

It’s only a myth, but it’s been said that Jack has never dropped a hen egg; he minds them so well.

As I said, this is the stuff of legend, who knows if there’s any truth to it.

He immediately has to go down to Nanny’s with his haul and if the mood is right, he will want to make scrambled eggs.

He loves to make scrambled eggs and add his own butter, salt and pepper and parsley.

It was so cute at the start, him learning such an important life skill as cooking so young, now it’s just making breakfast hardship.

But if he’s not that hungry he will just simply hold them in his hand, it’s his way of laying on them I think.

He will wander about the house, hands full of eggs.

It gives his grandfather palpitations; grandad Oliver doesn’t buy into the myth that Jack has never dropped a hen egg.

I think Jack is aware of the panic he causes too, I can see the divilment in his face.

Full disclosure, he dropped a duck egg before, but that doesn’t count, it caught him by surprise.

So, in the wake of discovering his obsession with eggs, we’ve begun planning to get him his own chickens.

We’re picked out where we’re getting our chicken coop and everything.

Now we just have to hope no predator gets at them, because that would be a difficult conversation and would probably require two additional chickens to be smuggled in in the dead of night that look exactly like John Lennon and Noel Gallagher.

In a cost-of-living crisis, the eggs are handy I suppose.

But between vet fees from fox attacks, feed and every other sort of thing that goes wrong, chickens are probably costing families more.

Who knows how these social trends emerge but we’re knee deep in it right now for however long it lasts.