“Do you think he’s at all, you know, recognisable?” she asked.As a meal for two, he was considerably less fine than he had been as a strutting cock. There wasn’t much meat on him and what there was, was rather tough Which I suppose was a revenge of sorts. He came round within the hour and stuffed Mrs Doubtfire into a cage, although not before Mrs D led him a merry dance round the chicken run. I confess that I looked on with a degree of pride as Mrs Doubtfire gave Malcolm a neat body swerve, not quite as I do when my eight-year-old son makes a successful sliding tackle in a school football match, but nearly.We had told the children that Mrs Doubtfire was going away to live with Malcolm, who collaborated admirably in the deception.

I suppose we should have told them the brutal truth – they need to know the realities of living in the country. Jane suggested backing over him in the Volvo.In the end I phoned Malcolm, who lives in the next village and had been recommended to us as an expert in these matters. I can saddle a miniature Shetland pony with only a limited amount of swearing. I can pick up a squawking chicken with something approaching insouciance.

But when it came to killing Mrs Doubtfire I realised that I was still very much a townie. I couldn’t bear the idea of wringing his neck or chopping his head off, largely out of concern for my own sensibilities, I’m ashamed to say, rather than his We tried to think of townie ways of killing a cockerel. We tried to find him a home, but nobody here has much use for a cockerel, even one as handsome and assertive as Mrs Doubtfire So we began to contemplate the unthinkable: eating him. After all, the hens weren’t laying much in his presence, probably distracted by the bloody racket he kept making.

And we didn’t want fertilised eggs from them anyway – we wanted poached and soft-boiled ones.
But how to dispatch him? I have now been living in the Herefordshire countryside for 18 months, and in that time my smallholding skills have come on apace. “You can shout for Yorkshire,” he said, but how can you honestly cheer for the East Midlands? How can you get up on your feet and shout ‘Come on, Bath and North-east Somerset’? It’s ludicrous!”"Maybe,” I said, “but does anyone ever shout a county name anyway? Have you ever heard anyone shout ‘Come on, Kent”?’”Yes, I have,” said Bob “The Duchess of Kent.”Yours etc
More from Miles Kington. The cockerel we originally thought was a hen, Mrs Doubtfire, is no more. Happy days!Yours etcFrom Mr Simon PantileSir, The only time I ever saw Bob upset about cricket was when a local-government act threatened to do away with half the counties involved in county cricket. You didn’t always associate Bob Monkhouse with physical humour, but when we had an umpire who had never met us before, he used to like to give the umpire a jersey to hold when he was bowling, along with all the other garments. What the umpire didn’t know was that there was a mobile phone concealed in the pocket of the jersey, and Bob would then ring the phone at crucial moments in the game, which would drive the umpire bonkers.