Metro is a free newspaper scattered eggstensively all over London and the Lands Adjacent, and today it featured an eggregious story about a chicken that laid enormous eggs. A quick trawl through the Metro archives reveals that stories featuring chickens laying les oeufs plus grands have appeared before, so even though I couldn’t track down today’s story online, here’s another, eggsumed from a few months back.
Our rescue chickens, mentioned a few posts ago, have now settled in. They are permanently ravenous, and are beginning to look less raw and scrawny and their feathers are starting to grow back. Much of the food seems to get translated instantly into eggs, some of vast size – at least to our eyes, habituated as we are to the eggs of bantams, which are usually much smaller. An egg laid yesterday tipped the scales at 75 g – which would be classed as ‘very large’ in any country you care to name (in Western Australia, for example, it would be graded as ‘Mega’ or ‘XXXL’.) At least one of our chickens thinks its a duck, or even a goose – or perhaps has ambitions to be an ostrich.
"'They are between 10 and 11cm long, whereas the average egg is just 6cm. We've kept the largest one whole as it's so special. Looking inside one of the eggs we found there was an entire normal egg inside – just like a set of Russian Dolls.'"Wow. I wonder if it's a measure of how poorly those birds had been treated before.
I dunno, Amy. Even when we'd only just rescued them, they laid big eggs. A lot. One thing you learn when you grow your own is that not everything comes ready-graded. The eggs we collect vary enormously in size: some eggs, laid at the beginnings and ends of seasons, are tiny, and shapes vary from almost spherical to markedly eggsentric.
We have Metro north of Watford too these days. We're hoping to get electricity soon.
(index.php isn't my real name, by the way. Something odd with your OpenID validation script.)
I figured your name wasn't 'index.php' – your secret is safe with me. Indeed, people who get on the Nowrich-London train at Colchester bring the Metro with them.For a short time the Croxii lived in Kings Langley, which is just north of Watford. A friend told us that as we were north of Watford we were obliged to breed whippets and keep our coal in the bath, and someone from the Council would come and check.