The Sparrow and the Sandal (God Bless Their Souls and Soles)

It's only Wednesday, and despite many distractions and hurdles vis a vis various family crisis situations which I shan't bore you with, we are making good headway into the list of 'Jobs To Be Done This Week.'

The car has four new tyres, ready for Winter and ready for its next MOT. Given the car is five and a half years old and was still on its original set bar one which suffered a puncture, it's done pretty well on the replacement tyre front. And now it is all perky and jaunty. When driving, it feels like the car has, well, four new bouncy tyres. In fact, it feels like its got four new rubber-soled sandals, which immediately brought to mind a traumatic experience I had when I was six or seven years old with a new pair of Clarke's shoes.

My mum was always very keen for us to have 'proper shoes' when we were growing up. You know, getting our feet measured ever six months in one of those electronic measuring machines which squishes your foot and tells you, in my case, that you've got one foot nearly a size bigger than the other. During the Winter, we had sensible black shoes, with proper straps, buckles and/or laces and good, solid heels. And in the Summer we had open-toed sandals with rubber soles, properly fitting straps and buckles. They were beige, which was a bit of a downer, but the upper was that you could bounce in them.

So one day, when I was about six or seven years old, our Summer sandals were purchased and I went for a bounce. I decided to bounce around the outside of my grandparents' farm-house because you could get a good long uninterrupted run and carry on as long as you wanted without having to stop, turn around and go back the other way. Around and around the outside of the house I bounced on my new bouncy Clarke's sandals. Bounce, bounce, boing, boing, it was like having Spacehopper feet.

And then, in the nanosecond of time it took me to bounce into the air and land, a sparrow flew from nowhere under my feet and I bounced on top of it with a heart-stopping crunch. It is the only time in my life I have ever killed a bird or animal, and I can still feel that awful rush of heat flushing through me as I realised what had happened. Looking down, the sole of one of my new bouncy Clarke's sandals was splashed with blood and the sparrow was very flat.

Panicked and on the verge of tears, I rushed off to find my Grandad. He brought me back to the scene of the crime (I regarded it as such because I had killed a bird with the thoughtless, egocentric admiration of my new sandals). He confirmed the sparrow was, indeed, dead. We scraped it up from the path and gave it a decent burial in the veg patch beside the wash-house. We put some wild flowers on the grave and then Grandad cleaned off my bloodied sandal over the wash-house drain using the wooden wire scrubbing brush my Gran did her steps and tiles with.

That was nearly forty years ago. It's odd how some things have such an impact on our memories.

The second job was to buy fresh bark chippings for Cluckinghen Palace. Once purchased, we decided to put the chippings in a pile in the middle of the run and let the hens have the fun of spreading them out themselves.

And what are they doing? They are sitting in the South End eyeing the pile suspiciously, not a hint of helpful digging in sight.

We're in the garden today. Doing an Autumn tidy. I'm going to supply the hens with fluorescent jackets, safety helmets, digging forks and the incentive of tea and cake if they shift the pile of chippings for us. I'll let you know if they oblige.