My hens are my heroes. They spend all day ‘sorting out’ our garden, warding off any unwanted predators by clucking in a panicky fashion and making themselves taller and even then they manage to produce eggs every day. Many have warned me that this is not going to last. Apparently they will take a break. Good. I am running out of recipes for eggs. However for the moment they deserve every piece of grain and every meal worm that they get.

I bought three kilos of apples to make apple sauce for a recent hog roast party just to be assured that it was all in hand and I needn’t have bothered. So I had big plans with the apples. Crumble, traybake, jams – it was all going to happen. Of course it didn’t. And the pretty crunchy apples turned a bit softer and wrinklier that desired. So I turned to my feathery heroes for help. And created a kebab for them.

It took them a couple of days to consume it but they did it. That reminds me, I have to go out and take the skewer back before one of them (probably White) impales herself on the blunt end.

At the same time as creating my poultry master chef entry, my phone blinked and buzzed and I received a message from my ‘Ugandan son’. He is in his third year of university and far from being an unknown sponsored boy, he is very well known to us (we visit him and other friends every year) and calls us Mum and Dad (and the honorable Freddie!).

Isaac and I have a passion in common – books and more books. I can read anything from the phone book to classics and and seems that he can do exactly the same. The first one I got him was John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and I was chuffed that he liked it. Considering that it took me until my thirties to acquire taste for school recommended literature, Isaac is miles ahead of me. I love that we can meet up or just message on facebook and discuss books that will stay with him for the rest of his life.

We are going to see him again this autumn and so in preparation for our visit he has texted me the books he wants me to bring him (the very few bookshops in Uganda and extortionately expensive and an orphan without job simply cannot afford the books). As I said to him – literature is one thing that I like spending money on.

My order arrived today – One hundred years of solitude, Oxford school dictionary and The odyssey.