It snowed in the night. About four inches, looking at what had settled on top of the wall outside the study and the stout wooden posts in the turning circle. The Systems Administrator went out to open the chicken house and defrost their water, but they would not come out. After breakfast I managed to tempt them through their pop hole with some leftover cold boiled potato, but once they'd eaten that they went in again, and there they stayed. In the middle of the afternoon I checked their water was not frozen, and some scratchy footprints in the snow showed that they had got as far as the water, but no further. Poor chickens. There is plenty of sawdust down on the floor of the house, and if they huddle together I hope they will be warm enough.
According to a book I had as a child, Along Came a Dog, by Meindert DeJong, if a hen's feet get too cold its toes will drop off. This happened to the hen heroine, who was no longer able to perch on the farmer's shoulder as was her habit. He solved the problem by cutting out two squares of rubber with holes in the middle and sewing them to the shoulder of his jacket. When the hen wanted to perch he shoved her knuckle bones into the holes to secure her. As a child I believed this piece of hen biology implicitly, and fifty years later I still don't want to test it empirically. However, the previous lot of hens survived the last cold winter with their toes intact.
Mr Fluffy went out in the snow very briefly, and spent the rest of the day sleeping in his fleecy cat bed on top of the cupboard. That was something of a relief as last time it snowed he got lost. Mr Fidget and Mr Cool thought the snow great fun, and spent most of the morning exploring. At one point I saw them chasing each other across the back garden, two black cats against the white, which would have made a great photograph if anyone had been there to capture it.
I took all the mess out of the bottom of a kitchen cupboard I've been meaning to tidy one wet day, vacuumed up the accumulated fluff, and put the mess back in a more structured and less messy form. Some of the things in the cupboard turned out to be useful. There were two sheets of what looked at first like dressmaker's interlining, except that that seemed an unlikely thing to have in a kitchen cupboard, so I asked the SA if it was a filter and if so did it fit anything we still had? The SA said that it was for the extractor fan, and in fact he could fit a new piece quite soon. There were a great many pots and bottles of polish and unguents for treating shoes, which whittled down to fewer by the time I'd thrown away the ones that had gone dry or completely solid. I don't understand why I had a bottle of something that appeared to be designed for snakeskin. The instructions were in several languages but not English, and I have never bought anything made out of snakeskin in my life. I threw it away, along with a brush with a nice wooden handle and pure bristle hairs, that would have been excellent if the hairs hadn't been falling out in handfuls. I was pleased to find two pots of leather balsam, and celebrated by polishing all my leather boots and my satchel.
The post arrived this morning as normal, but there were no tyre tracks so the poor old postman must have walked up from the farm. The Systems Administrator kept an eye on what Greater Anglia were up to, and said that after the rush hour there were no trains at all on our branch line for the rest of the day, but that although passenger services had been drastically curtailed all over East Anglia, freight trains were still pouring out of Felixstowe. Then on Radio 4's PM programme I heard that the normal timetable had been reinstated. Tendring Council have suspended bin collections from any roads that have not been gritted. That's most roads, then. Certainly ours.
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