The danger of keeping chickens – and they are generally about as un-dangerous a pet as it’s possible to find – is that the youngest members of the house have no idea that having barnyard animals in suburban gardens is not a very standard state of affairs.

“When can we get our pig?” was one of the first fully-formed sentences out of my toddler’s mouth, followed only a few weeks later with, “Can I have a sheep?”

His ongoing requests for farm animals probably wasn’t helped by an incident with an escaped lamb in Rye Lane a few months ago. Pootling along we came to what looked like a slightly dirty cloud zig-zagging across the road… My son thought it not remotely odd to see his mum hoisting a lamb up under her arm and popping it back over the fence (I hope it was the right fence).

Read the full column on the Vine magazine website.