The Good Life
A broody chook and a pile of prunings get some tough love at Lush Places Correctional Facility.
You know summer’s here when the chooks go broody. Little Linda, the youngest but somehow biggest of the evil chickens, took to her bed last week and wouldn’t be moved.
This caused chaos. The bed happened to be the only nesting box the other chooks will lay in. So for their sake and ours – the thunderous mithering was too much to bear – Lil’ Linda was sent to the Cooler quick smart.
A broody chook doesn’t drink or eat while she sits waiting for her unfertilised eggs to hatch (they won’t), meaning she will brood herself to death if nothing’s done. The cure is a short, sharp shock: a wire-bottomed cage to make the hen stand rather than sit, allowing her back end to cool down to its normal, non-broody temperature. After four days or so, she can be released back into the community.
Because we’re soft on crime, the Lush Places Correctional Facility is now more like a holiday camp. The cage is large, and it sits off the ground in the cool, breezy shade of the alders. There’s always plenty of delicious food, plenty of water and an ice bath underneath for additional cooling (Michele’s excellent idea). It also features a lovely view of this year’s magnificent display
of opium poppies. I’ve seen worse on Airbnb.
Still, prison is prison, and LL’s temporary incarceration for an overheated bum meant she missed out on the big excitement at Lush Places last week, the Inferno.
Through much of late winter and early spring, I trimmed and shaped and chopped and tidied the many specimen trees here at Lush Places. This obviously meant plenty of exciting, manly chainsaw action. It also meant a large pile of off-cuts and branches sitting in the middle of a paddock, a pile that needed burning before the annual summer fire ban.
It is one of the peculiarities of country life that burn-offs are still allowed. If you try lighting anything more than a boring old barbecue or a wanky, wood-fired pizza oven in the Big Smoke, it results in a Big Stink with the neighbours and with the authorities.
Still, setting fire to things makes me nervous. Hitherto, for the only burn-off we’ve had – of similar material, left by the previous owners – I had to enlist Miles the sheep farmer to hold my hand. I was determined to be a man about it this time.
But then I had a terrible thought: what about climate change? Would burning off the pile contribute to it? I decided it probably would. Would it be more than a townie sitting in traffic five days a week, or flying somewhere godawful, such as the Gold Coast? Probably not. But I was determined to offset my carbon footprint, even though we already have many, many hundreds of trees.
I had another thought. In lieu of another tree, I should make a sacrifice to the climate gods, but what? Like a bolt from the heavens it came to me: I’ll make an effigy of a climate change denier and burn it along with the pile.
It is a well-known fact that big league climate change deniers always wear suits. So I drove to the local Salvation Army Family Store and found a nice blue one, extra large. I came across a fetching red tie, extra long, at the SPCA Op Shop around the corner.
I watched a YouTube video on how to make a big-league effigy, which involves stuffing it with plenty of papers containing fake news, and making sure the thing’s head is stable (and also very, very smart, probably genius-level smart, to be honest).
After weeks of dry weather, it took a matter of a minute for the pile to catch alight, and not many minutes more for the climate change denier to burn in hell.
The heat was intense, with the flames reaching more than 10m into the air. But not for long. Less than an hour later, the pile and the effigy were gone, the climate gods appeased and a little money had gone to the needy. I can’t tell you how virtuous I felt.
It took a minute for the pile to catch alight, and not many minutes more for the climate change denier to burn in hell.