‘Let him wait for the crowing of the cock’
WHEN I was six years old, I was sent out to collect the eggs from our hen house. The experience was magical: feeling in the half-light, fingers in feathers and straw, then gently taking the eggs, one at a time, and putting them into a basket. The sensations and smells of that collecting are still with me now.
Instinct tells us that there are special, meaningful aspects of our relationship with our land and with the flora and fauna of the English countryside. Back in the 1970s, we were all reading about self-sufficiency and going ‘back to the land’ or perhaps keeping a
