Harpy, your song is darkness
for there is no light in bones.

Harpy, the rock you sit upon
is damp and cold and lonely.

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The original version of this poem was considerably longer and first produced way back in October 2004. As is often the case when you edit text with an eye on reducing rather than expanding the number of words and ideas, the new version of Harpy concentrates and has a much better focus.

Harpy remains what it was in 2004–a poem that deals with the isolation of bitterness and anger, how these feelings can change a person like an untreated infection coursing through the body.

In the case of the harpy, this is as much a physical as a mental transformation. I had in mind the notion that the mythological creature was once a very human woman whose body was mutated and personality eroded by obsession, insanity and rage.

Like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, who may originally have been a hobbit like Frodo and Bilbo, the harpy came into being (in my imagined take on her) as a new entity distinct from the old because centuries passed without an intervention until it was too late for anyone to try to bring her back, the damage permanently fixed.

The harpy is a monster of terrible power and awful majesty. And yet she is horribly, appallingly lonely.

An egg from a battery hen is pale and watery and utterly devoid of flavour when compared to one produced by a free-ranging, natural-living hen. Free-ranging happy birds produce firmer eggs with more colour to their yolks and are in a different league when it comes to taste.

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Those who pay extra for free-range eggs do so because they object to the cruel torture of the battery cage system. The relatively tiny number of ex-battery hens that are rescued by charities like The Battery Hen Welfare Trust go on to produce superb eggs when they have access to the great outdoors in retirement. The unlucky billions who don’t have homes found for them end up as processed/reconstituted chicken products and pet food when they reach the end of their commercial viability in just 18 months. Adopting ex-bats, however, raises awareness among friends, family and neighbours of just how battery eggs are produced and helps to change shopping habits by example.

Owen, 44, from Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, ran Heart of England Eggs Unlimited which supplied eggs to major packing companies that in turn supplied them to supermarkets and smaller retailers. Owen pleaded guilty at Worcester Crown Court to three charges of fraudulent accountancy relating to altering his records to disguise the fact that he was buying in eggs laid by caged hens and selling them on for a profit after “misdescribing” them in paperwork. And no, that isn’t a real word.

“The victims of Keith Owen’s false accounting were not only the direct customers of Heart of England but also the public as well as the legitimate egg producers,” said Amanda Pinto QC. “The ultimate customer, a member of the public buying these eggs, would have received inferior eggs, sometimes even eggs not fit for sale to the public or eggs produced by hens kept without the stringent welfare schemes from which they were said to benefit.”

Owen’s barrister, John Kelsey-Fry QC, suggested his client was far from the only one creating what he called “mischief” in the egg industry. “It’s not the case that all those who Mr Owen supplied eggs to were concerned to ensure that the provenance of the eggs was as described,” he said, adding it would be “inappropriate” to elaborate.

At the time of Owen’s fraud, which ran unchallenged between 2004 and 2006, farmers could expect to receive a price of around 90p per dozen for organic eggs, 70p for free range and 35p for cage eggs. As a middleman wholesaler, Owen would normally make a few pence profit per dozen but by passing off caged eggs as free-range and organic he could make an extra 35p profit for every 12 eggs he sold.

12 eggs. 12 birds suffering torture and misery. 35p profit. Now multiply by the millions. It’s a lot of money for a lot of cruelty.

In recent years urban and small-scale poultry-keeping has undergone a remarkable resurgence in popularity, almost entirely because people want to know where their food comes from and don’t want animals to suffer. Some bright sparks in various towns provide websites where home producers can register that they have ethical eggs for sale, and a few clicks can find a poultry-keeper maybe just a few streets away from your home. If no such scheme exists for your area, it still isn’t hard to find backyard keepers—many have signs up, telling the world they have eggs for sale—and you can undoubtedly find a source of local eggs from well-treated hens if you take a drive through the countryside.

This terrible news story certainly doesn’t mean anyone should abandon the purchase of free-range and organic eggs on the basis that the supermarkets and producers can’t be trusted. Do that and you’ll be back to sad, pale and flavourless eggs bought in support of factory farming. The supply chain needs a radical overhaul involving more rigorous checking, yes, but in the meantime there are tens of thousands of keepers who can be trusted, whose birds you can even meet to satisfy yourself that they are well-treated.

Payment to keepers like myself cuts out all middlemen and the eggs, while costing more than battery, are much cheaper than those sold in supermarkets as free-range and organic. At time of writing we have 21 birds in our garden and they produce around 10 half-dozen boxes a week. Those we don’t use ourselves we sell at £1.50 a box. My partner takes some into work where they’re snapped up and I’ve started doing the same with my night-class.

I’m currently awaiting feedback from my classmates as I only started selling to them this week. I’ve no doubt they’ll be impressed. People just love our eggs. We have had more compliments than we can count, which of course we pass on to the little ladies in our care. It isn’t just what the birds eat that makes the eggs so tasty—it’s the happy lives they live, loved and cared for. A lot of the time I can even tell customers the name and breed of the bird that laid a specific egg. I can talk about the bird’s personality. People do sometimes ask because they become enamoured with the size or colour, and taste, and want to find out more. Mass production can’t provide that deeper knowledge or assurance of quality.

With small-scale operations like ours, there is no commercial drive. We never make a profit. What little money we raise from selling the eggs goes towards paying for corn and layers pellets, coop maintenance and veterinary bills. To appropriate the slogan of a particularly ruthless supermarket, every little helps.

So support your local poultry keepers. It will benefit you and your family, the person looking after the birds that produce your eggs, and the hens themselves. And if you’ve got the space and time, why not consider adopting some ex-bats yourself? That’s how I started. I went on to develop an interest in many different breeds but our flock will always contain some ex-bats. We currently have five of these remarkable survivors running round the place.

The fact that we have rescue hens in our flock increases the appeal of the eggs we sell, although that’s not why they’re here.

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All but five of the birds were dead and those that weren’t had to be euthanised by RSPCA veterinary staff. There is no evidence that any of them had been poisoned or suffering from disease before they crashed.

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“Our best guess is that this happened because the starlings were trying to escape a predator such as a sparrowhawk and ended up crash-landing,” said RSPCA animal welfare officer Alison Sparkes.

The theory is a lame one. Although birds do act collectively when in flock formation, a more likely possibility is that the birds collided with the engines of a plane—although why they would be flying so high we can’t begin to guess.

The report fails to tell us if there is an airport near to where the incident took place.

Starlings are the most common garden birds in the UK but in decline everywhere else, which is why they are on the Red List of birds not yet endangered but getting there.

In the UK we have a saying going back centuries to denote periods of heavy rainfall–”It’s raining cats and dogs“–the origin of which is unknown, although as far as anyone is aware we have never experienced canines and felines falling out the sky.

One suggested origin of the phrase is that because drainage systems on buildings in 17th century Europe were poor, they may have disgorged their contents during heavy showers including the corpses of animals accumulated in them. “Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood,” wrote Johnathan Swift in his 1710 poem, Description of a City Shower.

Individual birds drop all the time, for various natural reasons ranging from exhaustion (particularly in summer heatwaves) to mid-air heart attacks.

The UK does, however, along with some other countries around the world have documented stories of fish, frogs and toads falling in significant numbers from the sky, sometimes in their hundreds. The only theory that has any real credibility among investigators, although there is no proof, is that the fish and amphibians are sucked up by strange air currents from bodies of groundwater like ponds and streams, to be deposited later.

The big problems with this theory are that on land nobody has ever witnessed anything like a column of water being drawn up into the air, nor does it explain why sometimes huge numbers of frogs and toads are gathered together in one place as if waiting to be hoovered up. It is true that in some countries amphibians and other animals gather in great numbers during breeding season, but that kind of behaviour is not witnessed across the entirety of Britain and when it is, it is only at specific times of year not necessarily tallying with when incidents involving the creatures falling from the sky take place.

Of course we don’t see what fish are doing most of the time but we know enough to say that many species of fish in the world’s oceans travel in schools, sometimes numbering in their thousands. The incidents of fish falling from the sky involve both freshwater and seawater species, but never the two together. And while they share the amphibian tendency to gather in a frenzy to breed, again the incidents do not always tally with the season in which such behaviour takes place.

The notion of an entirely natural phenomenon being behind the majority of these nevertheless bizarre creature showers is most likely, although the fact that nobody has ever witnessed the start and has only ever seen the end result is mystifying when you consider we’ve had thousands upon thousands of years go by during which you’d think someone, somewhere would have seen something and gone on to tell the tale. Certainly reports of these showers go back very early in the written record.

More out-there theories range from wormholes opening up between spaces in this universe allowing for instantaneous and fatally wounding transference, or rips in space-time between parallel worlds taking birds and amphibians from one Earth to another.

Another theory connects to UFOs, the idea apparently being that visitors to our planet do a spot of fishing before returning home, only to decide they don’t fancy a fish-and-chip supper (or frog-and-chip—they are aliens, remember, though you don’t need to be alien to eat frogs, you just need to sample some aspects of French cuisine) and go on to dump their catch as irresponsibly and thoughtlessly as human beings drop litter or allow factories to pollute rivers. Maybe they scoop birds out of the air in mid-flight?

The most charitable things we can say about these theories is that they are imaginative, highly creative and fun to consider. But I’d say the same about the RSPCA explanation for why 75 starlings fell out of the sky. The idea that a sparrowhawk could hunt its prey in such quantity and not swoop down to pick just one dead or injured bird up, and be witnessed doing so, doesn’t convince. If a sparrowhawk did catch one of the birds in the sky, why would they continue in a hypothesised panic after the predator departed with its meal? And how did 75 birds die if one bird of prey was in pursuit?

There is one theory that offers up something more credible where birds are concerned. Fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field have already been demonstrated to affect birds’ ability to navigate, both positively—helping homing pigeons get back to their coop from hundreds of miles away—and negatively, by confusing them. In the distant past there is some evidence that the north and south poles shifted significantly, something that would definitely affect the navigational abilities of birds (and planes, and sat-navs, and indeed everything electronic if it happens again). Sunspot activity has been shown to impact on weather patterns but whether sunspot changes affect life on Earth, and to what extent, is unknown.

The recent earthquake in Chile has been found to have slightly altered the Earth’s rotation, shaving off micro-seconds from the length of every day and potentially having impacts unknown that, whatever they might be, could be relatively subtle and missable. However, creature showers do not follow earthquakes as a rule and magnetic fields could never account for frogs and toads being scooped up or raining down. As far as anyone can tell.

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You can design your own spoof Tory poster here and then post it on Twitter or Facebook. It’s a brilliantly subversive act that is not only fun and made easy to do, but also contaminates and ridicules the propaganda messages the Conservatives are trying to get across on billboards around the country.

Along with your own text you can use your own images, as I did above, or choose the same ones as the Tories, like the example I created below:

If you try your hand at creating a spoof poster, why not upload the results to your own blogs and social networks and share links to them in the comments section below?

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Nick Davies and Rob Evans of The Guardian write that The News of the World has agreed to pay Clifford to drop his legal action over the interception of his voicemail messages. The settlement means that there will now be no disclosure of court-ordered evidence which is said to have threatened to expose the involvement of journalists in a range of illegal information-gathering by private investigators.

The case had enormous implications for Andy Coulson, the Conservative Party’s media adviser. Coulson was editor of The News of the World at the time of the alleged illegal activity and does not remember any of his journalists breaking the law.

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When one considers that The News of the World is the leading press advocate of mob justice, loves to spin stories about corrupt governance at a national and local level, and exposes the private lives of celebrities every weekend—doing everything under the ‘public has a right to know’ mantra—it is interesting to note that the same thirst for exposure is not to be turned back upon its own activities.

In paying out huge sums of money The News of the World is working hard to avoid ending up in court while ensuring that the public never gets to know anything at all about its own behind-the-scenes activities.

Clifford and the paper have, of course, a symbiotic business relationship going back decades. Unfortunately for The News of the World and its owner News International, the story may not be over yet. Politicians, leading actors and sportsmen are being reported as preparing to sue over the illegal interception of their voicemail messages. Not all of them may be willing to drop legal action when money is thrown at them.

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An estimated four billion pizza flyers, leaflets from local councils and blank envelopes promising the recipient cash prizes are already pushed through letterboxes by postal workers. Until now an agreement was in place limiting Royal Mail workers to no more than three items of junk delivered to each household weekly to make sure their bags did not get overloaded. You may not have noticed but you got a break from the rubbish at the weekends—until now.

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It is kind of possible to opt-out of junk mail deliveries but it’s offered up in such a way as to mean you can also lose mail you actually want to receive. The only real way in which people can actively protest is to mark unwanted items ‘return to sender’ and shove them into post-boxes around the country. If everyone did that, which of course everyone won’t, then Royal Mail would have to think again although junk mail is a big earner for the company.

Still, we might get a surprisingly large number of people fighting back in these Internet-empowered times, thanks to the word being quickly spread via social networking sites. If you’re a Twitter user the hashtag to use on related tweets is simply #returntosender.

You can recycle the paper and that’s certainly better than just throwing it away but does nothing to address the use of bleaches and other chemicals involved in producing the junk mail, nor does it do anything to cut down on the energy used up in the printing of these almost universally unwelcome and sometimes even dodgy promotions.

We’ll be monitoring what comes through our own letterbox in this household, and if it all becomes too much too quickly a return to sender policy will be adopted. If you do nothing, all you can be sure of is that the flood of unsolicited rubbish won’t stop and will be coming at you six days a week, all year round.

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An incessant beat
created by
an overwhelming need
to eat.

The other three hens
in a run all their own
bored of waiting
for me to come
in the morning
have learned
to open their own door
with beaks and toes
urgent, and tellingly bold.