We have a new game at Lush Places. It’s called Find the Egg. It takes two people and three chickens, and this is how you play: The game begins when one of your chickens ‒ your lazy, greedy, crap-everywhere chicken ‒ starts singing her “I’ve laid a lovely egg!” song. She will do this very loudly, so loudly you should expect noise complaints from neighbours.
She will then be joined in her celebration by at least one other chicken, which will sing a similar, also very loud song called, “She’s laid a lovely egg!”
The chickens will keep singing these songs until they get sick of it or you open a window and yell, “For the love of God, shut the hell up! If you don’t, I’ll cook you at 180°C for 11/2 hours or until you’re delicious, whichever comes first.”
When the racket finally dies down – and this may take some time – the game will become much less noisy, but even more frustrating as you try to Find the Egg.
You will definitely know where the egg won’t be. It won’t be in the laying boxes, which have been especially made and filled with lovely soft sawdust to provide the perfect spot for any chicken, even your chickens, to lay an egg. Sadly, your chickens would lay eggs in such five-star accommodation only if you nailed their feet to the floor, which you would never do because your chickens would definitely report you to the SPCA. Despite all the five-star food and accommodation, your chickens have no loyalty, you see.
So, you will know where the egg isn’t, but this will not help finding where the egg is.
To locate it, you must identify possible egg-laying spots in the vicinity of where your chicken sang its “I’ve laid a lovely egg!” song. This will require you to get down on your hands and knees and peer under bushes. It will require you, when you can’t see under the bush, to stick your hand in and feel about, hoping like hell that you don’t discover a colony of Gisborne cockroaches or a nest of wasps instead of an egg.
You will not find the egg under any bushes, rocks or even up a tree, but you will have dirt all over your hands and clothes. This will mean you have come to the end of the game.
While playing Find the Egg, you will encounter a gamut of emotions, what I like to call the five stages of an Eggs-istential Crisis: annoyance, frustration, desperation, a smidgen of melancholia and, finally, acceptance as you realise that today is not the day you will find the egg. It is important to try to not give up hope. Perhaps you will find the egg tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that.
However, there is the possibility you will never, ever find the egg. Then you will have no choice but to concur with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is alleged to have said that it’s the journey not the destination that matters and so, as more and more games of Find the Egg conclude with no egg, you will, instead, “find yourself”.
Or perhaps you will find yourself daydreaming, as I do, not of the journey, but of a better destination, one with five stars, a bar in the infinity pool and a menu featuring some other chicken’s eggs poached and served on delicious, generously buttered sourdough bread.
Take a long, hard look at the picture above. Then ask yourself, what is the world coming to?
Actually, I’ll answer that for you: when a cat and some chickens dine on the same food at the same joint – that would be Lush Places – the world has gone topsy-turvy: up is down, down is up, and surely it’s only a matter of time before the cat and the chickens are joined for meals by flying pigs and pink elephants.
This unholy scene has got me wondering: might it be possible to train the cats to surreptitiously follow the chickens around Lush Places, spot where they’re laying their eggs and then pass the info on to us?
And if we did, would that be cheating at Find the Egg?
