A Monthly Dog Blog

Hello everyone. I hope everything’s tickety-boo with you all.

With Easter upon us, thoughts turn to eggs especially of the chocolate variety. Mmm… I have to confess to having a liking for chocolate. But I’m only ever allowed a doggy choc treat as the real stuff can be poisonous for us canines.

Bossman’s always had an affinity for eggs – that is the edible type laid by chickens. Maybe it’s something to do with when he was born. At the time his mum went into labour with him, she’d been watching a film starring Fred MacMurray, called ‘The Egg and I’. You could call that a cracking start to his life!

Bossman can certainly look back at a life littered with egg-related incidents. As a four-year-old lad, he and his parents were living in Cyprus. One Easter, they decided to have a picnic up in the Troodos mountains with some of their Greek Cyprian neighbours and their children. 

It turned out to be a memorable picnic as the adults had painted a clutch of hard-boiled eggs in reds, blues and greens and then hidden them in the woods for the kids to go on a treasure hunt to find them. Bossman found the most. Trust him.

Liking eggs does mean a link to where they come from. So, no surprise, chickens have featured fully in Bossman’s life with his dad cultivating that interest. They used to live in Bournemouth with a small back garden sloping up from their bungalow, dominated by a couple of apple trees. No room to rear chickens? Wrong. Bossman’s dad managed to construct a chicken coop which integrated the lower branches of the apple trees as part of a two-tier roosting and laying quarters. 

It became the happy home of six Rhode Island Red chickens, and so the family were the happy recipients of daily fresh eggs. Bossman’s dad kept a log of the number of eggs laid each day and also pencilled the date laid on each shell. If he could have labelled them with the actual hen that had produced them, I’m sure he would have done so.

In echoes of the Cyprian painted eggs, Bossman did one Easter, construct a tableau for his parents as a present. In the centre, a chocolate Easter egg from Woolworths wrapped in silver foil. Around it he arranged several of his dad’s eggs, nestling in grass clippings from the compost heap; and wedged between them five fluffy yellow toy chicks (also from Woolworths), their pipe-cleaner legs bent at right-angles to ensure they didn’t topple over. Ah… How sweet.

King Edward I of England presented his royal household with similar Easter gifts though on a much grander scale: 450 eggs coloured and decorated with gold-leaf. No Woolworths around in those days.

Bossman’s egg-interest followed him into practice once he’d qualified as a vet. When he moved to a small holding with seven acres it simply cried out to have some chickens strutting round and producing those fresh eggs he always yearned for. 

It was his wife, Maxeen and daughter, Rebecca, who actually set the ball (or rather the egg) rolling. Between them they levered an old shed into what had once been a dog run with a high mesh fence surrounding it. An ideal pen for hens, safe from foxie. Four at-the-point-of-lay hens were purchased and named: Martha, Mabel, Matilda and Mavis. Rebecca’s four Ms. And those hens duly discharged their duty: fresh eggs every day. No, Bossman didn’t pencil the production dates on their shells like his dad did. He merely relished their contents.

Until that fateful morning when he went out to the chicken run to discover that a fox had managed to climb over the six-foot fence and somehow nosed open the shed door. The four Ms had been chased out into the pen, there to be slaughtered by decapitation, their bodies strewn round the run as evidence of their massacre. Understandably, such an upsetting scene meant the cessation of further hen keeping.

With regard to the continuation of any Easter tradition, well Bossman doesn’t present his wife with anything remotely resembling the Faberge Easter egg presented by the Russian Czar, Alexander III to his wife. That was made of gold and white enamel inside of which there was a golden yolk containing a golden hen with ruby eyes.

Maxeen will just be happy with the large chocolate egg stuffed with truffles that he’ll get for her.

I’ll also be happy, providing I get one (or two or three) of my doggy choc treats. They will barely touch the sides as I woof them down. Followed by much smacking of lips.

Yummy. Yummy.

Love & licks from Dora xx  

P.S. My Bossman is Malcolm Welshman. 

His latest novel, Pets are a Pleasure, is available from www.amazon.co.uk

The paperback book is available for £8.57. Kindle price is £3.50.

Malcolm Welshman has his own website at www.malcolmwelshman.co.uk