The fashion is now not only to have a few hens pecking in the back garden. It is to have rescue hens, morally superior ones, adopted at the end of their commercially productive lifestyle.
Colony cages may have replaced battery cages, but the birds still emerge from the factories looking like victims — featherless, bruised, pallid and institutionalised. They’re only a year old. Taking them home and watching them grow feathers and thrive is giving people a warm glow. He who saves one life saves the world and all that. I re-homed a rescue dog; I know. Us virtue signallers claim we can tell our animals are grateful for being given a better life.
These lucky hens, had they brains, certainly should be. Once naked, caged and facing euthanasia, they are now clothed in hand-knitted woolly jumpers until their feathers grow back, fed croissants in the fresh air and given heat lamps in winter. Three local rescue birds are fed sausage rolls and given hot milk when it’s freezing. They’re called the Golden Girls — Blanche, Dorothy and Rose — and demonstrate their gratitude by laying three eggs each a day.
Another friend picked up six rescue hens last weekend; she describes it as a form of care in the community. She can keep them laying until they’re seven, although she claims she’s past the stage of naming them. Not even Bald, Balder and Baldest.
Not so wild West
On that subject, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have called their new surrogate baby girl Chicago West, to join brother Saint West and sister North West. Which I thought quite restrained really. Could have been something a bit more out there, like Princess Destiny, Ceilidh, Crystal, Pocahontas, Johnathin, Konna, Chelseigh, Morgyn and Tarmigan — all living and phonetically proud children. Never mind, there are two babies coming this year for the royal family to join in. We live in hope.
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Social stereotype
Disapproval at the Channel 4 drama Kiri swells among the long-suffering souls who work in child protection. They are deeply disappointed by the character played by (the totally amazing) Sarah Lancashire, which stereotypes social workers as incompetent, emotionally flaky women in woolly jumpers who take their dog to work, drink out of hip flasks to face the day and turn up drunk at the houses of junkie clients. It’s not exactly improving public attitudes to a badly paid, nightmare job where you’re damned whatever you do, a social worker friend remarks plaintively. She hopes the plot will redeem itself but isn’t holding her breath.
Meanwhile, for those who think their job is tough, she faces a clutch of routinely ghastly cases, including a decision involving home-schooled children, which, post-Turpin family, is worrying her. An estimated 50,000-80,000 children in the UK are home-schooled; the number is booming. Parents don’t have to get permission to do it, nor do they need any qualifications or teaching experience. The families aren’t registered; the child is effectively off-grid, sitting no exams and growing up invisible to the authorities. I find that scary.
Dr Evils in the Alps
This week Davos hosts the World Economic Forum, an event that John Lanchester, arch-demystifier of high finance, described in his book How to Speak Money as a “rich people’s club, committed to preserving the existing world order” and “funded by the usual Dr Evil wannabes — Goldman, Google, GE, and that’s only the Gs”. Davos, he noted, is also a name of the pirate Davos Seaworth in Game of Thrones — whose fingertips were cut off as punishment and placed in a bag around his neck — and is nearly the same word as Davros, evil creator of the Daleks.
“The annual theme,” Lanchester warns “is always some magnificent piece of content-free corporate bullshit.” Sure enough, this year’s is “Creating a shared future in a fractured world”. What a place, though, to be a fly on the wall.