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“Taylor Made Fun” is an amusement arcade in Cleethorpes.
 Taylor Made Fun Spotted in Cleethorpes.
It was just about the only thing open on a cold and damp October Friday evening. It’s funny, you visit Cleethorpes as a child and remember it being big, exciting, and great for fish and chips. Then you go on your own as an adult and find that it’s none of those things.
I took the train from London to Cleethorpes so that I could walk along the sea wall to Grimsby Town’s stadium to watch Bradford City thump them 1-3. My hopes for having visited a “new” stadium were dashed when my dad told me that he’d never taken me to see Hull City when I was about 10 years old… I remembered going somewhere on the east coast to watch Bradford draw 1-1, but it turned out that it was Grimsby – so I managed to revisit a stadium I’d already been to, rather than visit a new one.
While looking up the route between the train station and the ground, I found some online reviews of some great fish and chips – so made sure to plan a route accordingly. The chip shop mentionned in the reviews had closed, but I managed to find a reasonable alternative. I was finishing off the chips when I walked by the first away fans’ entrance to the ground, and then paid at the turnstiles for the second entrance.
The only problem was that there is only one away fans’ entrance: I had entered the home end. I asked the stewards if they’d let me go through into the away fans’ end, but they didn’t believe me that I was a Bradford fan. I only had a train ticket from London to Cleethorpes, so couldn’t prove that I was from Bradford. I don’t have a Yorkshire accent any more. I had my Bradford scarf, but since I’d been eating hot chips I’d put it in my pocket so it didn’t look very convincing when I took it out of my bag. In the stewards’ defence, I didn’t present a very good case – especially when he decided to give me a ‘test’ and asked me which building was currently being demolished in Bradford. I didn’t know, so he asked me which road a particular cinema was on in Bradford, but I didn’t know that either.
He let me though eventually, after I claimed that he could tell that I was from Bradford because I didn’t have a Grimsby accent – not because he believed me, but I think because he realised that I wasn’t going to give up and I’d interrupted his conversation so if he let me go through, he could carry on.
Ironically, there was some crowd trouble at the end of the match and some fans ran onto the pitch – but they were Grimsby fans from the home end.
I grew up in a small house in a tropical village. Our compound was ‘L’ shaped that went round one side of our house and to the back, rather like a typical semi-detached house in suburban England. Next to our house was another house with a wide path rather than a compound next to it, and next to this wide path was a stream.
The two houses were on a slope, with ours being the higher and, by comparison, much the larger. For some reason, the family in this other house did not have the use of the compound behind their own house, but we did. We had a back door and they did not, so perhaps this had something to do with it.
There were two tall palm trees at the front, with one coconut tree for company. At the side was a rambutan tree, with fruit so sour that no-one cared for them at all. Along the edge of the back compound were a guava tree, a soursop tree, a lime tree, some pandan plants, several papaya trees, a clump of banana trees and another rambutan tree which sometimes bore few fruit and at others not at all. In the middle of the compound was a large clump of pineapple bushes.
Childishly I yearned for the guava tree to be an apple tree. I wished and wished for the papaya tree to be a pear tree. Faithfully and without fail, these trees provided us with delicious fruit which we ate mostly after each meal, but still I wished that they were different. I thought that children in England were really lucky because they not only had Enid Blyton type adventures, they actually had real apples from real apple trees. I wished I was in some English village tracking villains and enjoying building snowmen.
One morning I noticed a slight movement of what I thought was a dried leaf beneath the guava tree. It moved again, so I went closer to see why it was moving when the other leaves around it were still. I reached out to pick it up, but stopped just in time, when I noticed that it had legs – black, stick-like legs, each one as fine as a piece of black thread.
I continued to observe. I ignored the world around me with its own timetable, as I spent almost half an hour or so watching a miracle.
Here was a young butterfly emerging from its cocoon, drying out its wings in the beam of sunlight which had fallen through the leaves of the guava tree. As the beam moved along with the hour of the day, the butterfly crept forward with it, as though to keep up with the warmth that was on the move.
Eventually the butterfly’s wings fluttered faintly. Its legs trembled. I could not help but notice how fine its knees were, as they took the weight of the young butterfly, now fully emerged and walking slowly. I was slightly disappointed that its wings were a dull brown and not a bright splash of an assortment of colours, but at the same time, I was thrilled that it was alive and not flying away from me.
I had to tear myself from the spot and carry on with the business of the day – I had been on my way to the bathroom when I had been distracted by this creature.
When I returned and looked for the butterfly, I could not see it. I was so terribly terribly disappointed. It had flown away and left me! I sat down on a large stone beneath the guava tree and looked around, in case there were others. There were not, but a movement caught my eye. It was my butterfly! It had continued to crawl forward in my absence, and had made very good progress in that time, so I had been looking for it in the wrong spot.
Unexpectedly it seemed to shake and flutter and, with a little leap into the air, flew up and away, lightly flapping its young wings. It flew around in a circle near me and then in a straight line away from me to land on a small branch in the lime tree to wait for a few moments before this time flying away, with great confidence and grace, out of my sight. I marvelled at how shiny its dry wings were.
I stood up and remained under the guava tree for a while, thoroughly heartened that the butterfly had hung around and waited for my return before taking off. Suddenly I was glad that in our compound was the guava tree and not an apple tree. I knew that butterflies and apples were around for only a few months in the year in England. Here in our compound, I had butterflies all the year round, except when it rained.
More photos later!
In June 2007 we lost Henrietta and Yoko in quick succession. Penny and Chelle seemed a bit lost on their own, and we didn’t want them to lose interest in life, and felt that it wouldn’t harm anyone to have a few more hens in the household, so we returned to the same farm from which came the original four, and bought another four. They weighed around a kilo each. Compared to the mature hens, these new ones were skinny, small and babyish, and almost fragile. No doubt they were peace-loving creatures.
Chelle and Penny in particular left us terribly disappointed because they did not welcome the new hens at all; instead they were positively hostile to the newbies. Each of the four arrived with innocence intact and after a month had developed the attitude associated with adolescents. The first two nights were fraught with nervous uncertainty and undisclosed terror. Penny demonstrated a resentful strop of a hen high on indignation and pecked and bullied all of the new ones relentlessly.
On the third day we kept Penny and Chelle outside the enclosure for a whole week, giving them the caravan to sleep in, while the four new hens remained within the enclosure with the henhouse to sleep in. This seemed to do the trick, and after a week, we took down the barriers and allowed both parties to mix. There were about another four weeks of ducking and diving for survival by the young hens who, by now, had established themselves as faithful layers, and were able to hold up their heads proudly as having a legitimate claim to the garden.
Now, eight weeks since their arrival, there is peace in the camp once more, with a surprise “top hen” from the four, and a killer instinct demonstrated in daylight.
Yesterday we returned from what can be described as the best holiday we’ve ever had. We had gone camping in Dorset and attended a family wedding, and came back just before the skies dumped their rain clouds on the country.
This afternoon as we were looking out at the garden, Annette noticed an unusual shape on the ground between the caravan and the gate to the enclosure. Eagle was standing close to it watching it, and we quickly saw that it was a rat. At that point, Eagle noticed us and left the rat to come towards us, to be first in the queue for any offerings we might have for them.
Unexpectedly, the rat remained quite still – almost as though it was playing dead. It lay still for several minutes, and we were debating what to do next when one of the hens down by the compost bin spotted us through the window and made her way towards us. She walked past the rat motionless on the ground and stood by the door.
In order to generate more activity, Daniel opened the back door, and the rest of the hens came running towards him. The foot of one of the hens actually trod on the head of the rat, and she continued towards the door; however the rat made its first fatal error and twitched its head.
This movement caught the eye of one of the hens in the group expecting a treat from Daniel, and she pecked at it. Then the rat made its second fatal error and squeaked. This was enough for all four hens to attack it with a frenzy of feathers, beaks and claws, with the squeaking from the rat being enough only to indicate its participation in the kill – as prey rather than predator – and the growls and squawks from the hens to indicate theirs.
Annette was concerned that the rat might strike back and impart goodness knows what horrible disease in its bite, so Daniel went out and finished off the fight for the hens. There was a definite air of triumph among the girls, and the poultry equivalent of whooping and hollering when the rat lay dead beneath Daniel’s Dutch clog. He was almost being told off by them, as they were in control and there was no requirement from him to stop the fight, unbalanced in size and number though it might have been.
We disposed of the rat’s body, gave the hens a treat of sunflower seeds and grained corn, and delivered a new found respect and awe to our hens who had taken on a rat and won in such style and uncompromising execution.
Yoko lived and died with her foot on the gas pedal. We cannot forget what a character she was. She was the first one up each morning, the first one to push her way through the enclosure gate to get to the worms in the garden, and the last one to bed each night: and even then she would push her way in to get to the best spot on the perch between her sisters who had got there first.
She loved the chickweed in our garden, and we could always rely on her to clean up in the flowerpots we would put down for her to work on. She also loved flowering plants, in particular lobelia which hung low from hanging baskets and bags. It was not uncommon to see her crouching low, getting ready to spring a jump up to the hanging plant in order to get a good chunk from it.
She was also a very independent hen. She had the courage of Chelle, but not the morals, and it didn’t bother her to use violence on her sisters to get her own way. She wouldn’t be afraid to push the boundaries as far out as she could, knowing that the worst that could happen would be a stern (and ineffective) telling off as she was being carried back into the enclosure to have some time to think about what she’d done.
She has moulted three times in the three years she’s been with us, and each time when it’s been really cold. (All the other hens have moulted just the once.) During her moult, she would appear weak, and walk crouching low like a cat. She didn’t like being touched, let alone being picked up, but she didn’t mind Penny grooming her and removing the very light wrappings on her new feathers. She would always recover magnificently.
The day that she died was not a normal day. She was the last one out of the enclosure, which meant that something was not right at all. She had been weak and poorly for over a week, and we had increased the treatment (apple cider vinegar, live yoghurt and spice) we had been giving her, but as she hadn’t improved, we phoned the vet to make an appointment for Yoko. The earliest appointment was at 11.50 that morning, so we took that. At 11.20 Daniel prepared a box with a towel ready in the garage, and then went to bring her in to settle her in.
Suddenly she stiffened and started vomiting. Quite a lot of fluid came out, as Daniel held her head forward to assist in the flow. He held her against his body as more clear fluid came out of her beak. She struggled weakly, flapping her wing as the colour in her comb and wattles turned a purplish red. She had stopped breathing, so the only thing that Annette could think of doing was to blow some air into her lungs. This revived her for a few seconds, but then she went into another spasm, struggling to breathe, and this time just died there and then very quickly. It was no more than 30 seconds from the time she stopped vomiting and started to struggle until the time she died. It was over very quickly, and so unexpectedly. There was not a gentle ebbing of life – there was only the on and off switch. Poor Yoko.
Daniel felt that we should still take her to the vet, if only for a diagnosis, in case it was infectious. In the waiting room at the vet’s clinic, a fluffy old woman breezed in and announced her arrival to the receptionist who told her quite soundly that she was over an hour late for her 10.50 appointment. Her blasé response of: “Oh we couldn’t find the cat” incensed me to smouldering point. I spent the whole of the waiting time glaring at her across the waiting room. Yoko could have had that 10.50 slot, and perhaps it would still have been too late to save her, but we will never know. We do know though, that to behave like a bitch in a manger with your appointment is unforgivable.
The vet who saw Yoko was not the same vet who saw Henrietta, and was a bit vague as to the cause of Yoko’s death. She said that she would call back on Monday with a more detailed analysis, but as she hasn’t done so yet, we do not know what caused Yoko’s death, but she did die from a heart attack. Knowing Yoko, that is exactly how she would like to have gone, if we couldn’t organise her being shot as a freedom fighter.
On Friday 11th May 2007, Henrietta was diagnosed as having a liver tumour, and so we had to have her put down. She had been slowing down for a few weeks, but we thought that it might be due to old age or the warm weather (or both).  On Friday morning we found her standing still within the enclosure, twitching her neck in a ‘S’ shape. Her eyes were wide open with a manic stare. Her heart rate was abnormally high and her crop was very full. We brought her indoors.
She refused food, then when we massaged her crop gently, she vomited a brown slimey liquid with small bits of food. She did not fuss at all. All that we could do was to keep her warm and comfortable. Daniel stayed with her most of the time.
In the afternoon, we found a vet’s appointment for her and Channa our helpful neighbour drove Daniel and Henrietta to the vet – in his Mercedes sports car. It was then that we received the diagnosis with shock and huge disappointment. She had been suffering from the tumour for a few months, and her food was not getting through her system properly, yet she had bravely soldiered on. She had stopped laying for as many months, but again, we had put it down to old age. Daniel took her home so that Annette could say goodbye as soon as she could come home from work.
Once home, Henrietta rested again, then at around half-past five, she indicated that she wanted to go out into the garden, so Daniel let her out. She walked around the garden slowly, and met up with the other hens. Then it started to rain, and she stayed outside, going all around the garden as she would when she was healthy. She then took shelter under the caravan and drank drops of rain water that was dripping down from the caravan.
We brought her indoors and she started to preen herself. It was almost as though she had gone around the garden one last time to say goodbye because she knew that it was time to go, and now she was getting her best coat on. It was heartbreaking to see such dignity in the face of death.
We drove her up to the vet and she was as good as gold, remaining calm and co-operative right to the last as she was put down. We saw her again before she was taken away, and she looked very peaceful and serene. Her necklace of a lovely ring of white feathers around her shoulders was still distinctive and she was suffering no more.
 Grace bought me a Porkert sausage maker for Christmas – it’s fantastic. It’s something that I always wanted but I didn’t know it… and while I can’t pretend to be an expert (I’ve only made three pounds of sausage so far), it is great fun – and already we’re making very nice sausages indeed.
It is actually as good as it looks on the box (right), even though these things rarely are. I’m sure that there are electric sausage makers, and that in the world of manually operated mechanical sausage makers there are lovely British-made models with nice safety guards and child-friendly handles… but not for our Portkert N°5!
Made in the Czech Republic, we got no instructions with the machine at all, and opening the brown cardboard box we found some greaseproof paper wrapping the tin-plated cast-iron mincer and its blades – all we had to guide us was a series of diagrams on the back of the box. This is my favourite image – it tells you everything you need to know:
First off, I gave the machine a good wash (it arrives with a bit of grease on each part of the machine – not sausage grease, but machine grease. After mincing a couple of onions to get a feel of what we should be doing (and to clean through any grease left over), we set to work.
Meat in the top, mince out at the bottom – simple as that!
No gristle, no knuckles, no eyes, no brains
I didn’t know anything about sausages until now, but after a bit of reading, I am getting there. Sausages aren’t just pork, they need particular cuts of pork, and they also need rusk or breadcrumbs to absorb the fat/flavour and stop them from being too dense, and of course they also need seasoning – salt, pepper, nutmeg, ginger and some herbs.
A good sausage should be about 25% fat – much less than that and it’s not a sausage, and you’ll not really be able to fry it. I read that a sausage should be made with pork belly or pork shoulder (or a mix of the two to acheive the 25% fat), but so far I have only used belly.
Seasoning – version one (photo without the salt):
Freshly ground nutmeg, black and white pepper along with powedered ginger
After a bit of reading, I settled on making the sausage with 80% meat, 11% water, 6½% breadcrumbs and 2½% seasoning. The seasoning I used was 28g salt, 3½g each of white pepper, black pepper and nutmeg, and then 2g of mace and ginger. Mace is made from the coating of nutmeg nuts, and since I didn’t have any, I just used extra nutmeg.
I used breadcrumbs instead of ‘rusk’, but only because I *had* bread which I could dry out and break down, and I didn’t have any rusk. The first batch of sausages were way too salty and we couldn’t really taste the nutmeg so I used 1¼% of seasoning instead of 2½%, and then added more nutmeg and about half a teaspoon of sage. That really worked well.
Everything mixed together
I bought the meat from Sainsbury’s, I got pork belly (but they labelled it “streaky rashers”) cut into strips. It was a pack weighing 616g, so that meant 616g was 80% of the weight – so a bit of simple maths on the percentage split of the ingredients above left me with 50g breadcrumbs, 100g water and 8g of my seasoning mixture. Mixed together in a bowl and we have mashed sausage ready to go into tubes.
The Porkert machine comes apart, the blade comes out, and the metal grinding plate from the front is replaced by a plastic funnel, around which goes the dry sausage skin. Feeding the mix back through the machine, we could get it into the skin – it’s probably the hardest bit of making the sausage, but I’m sure it’ll get easier with experience.
Sausage mix in the top, sausages at the bottom this time!
I thought that it would be easier for our first time to make one giant sausage and cook it as a Cumberland-like ring. No such luck – too much meat going into the skin and it burst, so I had to master the art of twisting the filled skin without breaking it or without leaving any bit of sausage un-filled. Alternating the twists clockwise and anti-clockwise between sausages is supposed to make the “links” stay together, but each time I’ve done it so far, by the time it comes to the second twist I’ve forgotten which way I did the previous one!
Finished sausages frying in the pan
The result was good though – the first ones looked like a sausage even though they were a bit salty, but the second ones – with half the seasoning but twice the nutmeg and a sprinkle of sage were delicious. Since we’re using dried skins (not sure what the skin is made from yet, but I will find out), the finished sausages have to sit in the fridge overnight to ‘hydrate’ the skin. That’s not too bad – to be honest after all of the preparation (and then washing the Porkert machine itself, drying it and putting it away), you want a cup of tea – not a sausage.
Egg laid by the hens this morning, sausages hand-made last night.
You know you want to!
I’ll keep up with trying different things – as well as investigating rusk and different cuts of meat, Grace has suggested we try ground down oats instead of bread/rusk, Annette wants to try different ways of reaching 25% fat (less fatty meat mixed with olive oil). I think that the consistency with the breadcrumbs has been perfect and that there’s only really room for improvement with the herbs (we only had old nutmeg so with some fresh that should improve too).
I did lots of Googling to find out what to do, what to use and how to do it. I read everything that I could and then based everything above on bits and pieces from things that I had read. I visited many websites, but if you fancy reading more than I’ve put here, these are the sites that I bookmarked:
We had a very unexpected and unusual surprise on Christmas Day. Daniel had gone to raise the hatch door to the hen house in the morning, and (as usual) the first one down from the perch was Yoko. She skipped out towards the food hopper but then did a double take on something which she had just passed, by the hatch itself. She took an investigative peck at it, which rang alarm bells for Daniel who raced around the enclosure fencing to the front door of the hen house in order to be able to reach the object of interest before Yoko or any of the hens harmed themselves.
What he saw was an unidentifiable creamy coloured object the size of an egg but elongated like an irregular sausage about 3 inches in length, with curves and bumps not unlike a pod of broad beans. Feeling under pressure from the three hens still on the perch waiting to descend, and not wishing to pick up something which could potentially harm everyone, he grabbed a piece of newspaper from the top of the nestbox and used that to pick up the pod to remove it from the hen house.
This is what it looked like
(the flakes on the surface are bits of sawdust)
A couple of hours later, after several photos had been taken, it was decided that we simply had to dissect the thing in order to satisfy at least some of our curiosity – or indeed inflame it more.
Using sugar tongs and a kitchen knife, Annette cut it lengthways in half. A clear liquid squirted out, for which only Grace was prepared. (She works adjacent to a pathology laboratory, so is used to hearing shrieks of “There are maggots coming from it – maggots!” or “I was not prepared for that smell!”) Indeed the clear liquid had an unpleasant odour rather like a day old soiled nappy.
We didn’t know what to expect inside, but we didn’t expect this.
We were fascinated to find what was revealed. The “shell” was as thick as a banana skin and made up of three to four layers. The inside was made up of what appeared to be thin layers of polythene all concertinaed together in frills. It seemed as tough as polythene as well. There was no liquid, but it was moist, like the inside of a cooked juicy sausage, as was its colour and texture. In other words, get a raw sausage, separate the inside from the skin then squeeze it together and force it all into the skin of miniature banana, steam it and you’re more or less there.
Grace trawled through the internet to find answers to our questions, and came across a website with pictures of something very similar but not providing answers.
A few months ago Penny was having difficulty laying an egg. She had been uncomfortable for hours and we kept close to her to keep an eye on her without interfering. Finally, she passed her egg, only it turned out to be a small amount of mucus and what looked like a cocktail sausage. The passing of this gave her visible relief, and she shook herself, gave a big sigh and stood still to recover. The other hens though spotted the sausage like object, pecked at it and – Yoko in particular – carried on eating it until it was all gone. Annette saw all of this but did not believe her eyes. What was it that she had actually seen? She told Daniel about it, but he had not seen anything similar.
Now here was something in the same strange family of “weird things passed by a hen” which all of us could see, examine and preserve with photos.
» More photos of the strange egg in the photo gallery
We’re starting this page to keep all of the hens’ strange eggs in one place.
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