Tom Hanks had Wilson the volleyball, I have 4 feathered friends.

A lot of you are in the same boat as me at present – nobody to talk to for much, if not all of the day … all day every day. As mentioned previously in these spaces, with no doggo around anymore, the only beings to talk to during working-at-home hours are the geese, the sheep, the alpaca and the chooks. They’re not exactly lively conversationalists, but it looks to me like they’re listening as I prattle on about life, the universe and everything.

I’ve always been up for a chat, and with a Pre-school educator wife still working, and an 18 yr old working in the (essential service) food industry this year, this ‘livin’ alone on a desert island’ life has a couple of downsides to go along with the awesome benefits. I’m absolutely loving the trakky dak wearing, coffee drinking part of it all, but talking and singing at the top of my lungs to myself could only go on for so long. So I’ve taken solace in a good ol’ chinwag to the animals. They don’t answer back, or tell me my ideas are hair-brained.

One of the geese is grey/black, whilst all the others are white, so I named him Retief. After the famous South African golfer, Retief Goosen, of course J. I can’t tell the other ones apart, so they’ll just remain as gooses 1 to 4. The alpaca has a curly wave of hair/wool that comes over his forehead, so for the eight years that he’s been part of our family, he has been Elvis. Whilst he doesn’t come when you call, he knows his name and looks you in the eye when you address him. As an aside, we’ve always, well, ahem, had our little flock of sheep for the sole purpose of keeping us in shanks, legs and ribs. So, naming them would go against the creed that sees you unable to knock off anything with a moniker – so they will remain nameless.

But the chooks. We have been remiss (much to the disappointment of my now 21-year-old) in naming the four egg producing marvels. For no real reason. So, when a comedian did an interview from isolation last week on the tele and mentioned the names of his chooks, I thought I’d steal those names and come up with a couple more of my own to make them a real part of our family.

But what to call them?? Well, it’s taken a full week to finalise the list. It was harder than naming our own children, I believe. Here goes : from about age 8 I have loved the game of tennis, with Bjorn Borg my all-time fave. So a logical choice for chicken number one, with its lovely mop of red feathers on top was Boris Pecker. When he won Wimbledon at age 17 I thought redheads would take over the world. Maybe one day they still might.

The last few years have seen me become a huge fan of Aussie Hip-Hop music legends the Hilltop Hoods. So chook number two was named after their song, which was a tribute to the National Lampoons movies. She’s called Cluck Griswold.

Names for Chooks three and four I stole. Now they’re both ladies obviously, but let’s not spoil it. My love of, and fanatical relationship with, all things A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away …. is well known – so our two noisiest and best egg-producing beasts are forever to be called Hen Solo and Princess Layer.

I can tell them apart. I wonder if they can sense the effort I recently put in to giving them names? They seem to love a chat too. Maybe Hen and Layer have got the power of ‘The Force’.