IT has been a mad dash up and down the motorways to see a different school nativity play, concert and performance every day this week.

John, left at home on farm watch, is feeling neglected, or so he tells me. Those emotions have rapidly dispelled each morning however, as he packs up his Landrover and gun to go off to another day shooting, picking up or beating.

The actual work involved leading some straw for a neighbour seems to have taken up very little time.

But extra work for me, when I am home, has been created by the latest news story scare surrounding bird flu.

To be honest I wonder if all the precautions I am taking to keep our chickens in is necessary, because after just one story on the news about this subject, there has been no more information.

Deep within the pages of the farming comics we receive, though, there have been alerts to a particular vicious, to birds not humans I hasten to say, new bird flu virus.

The advice when I go on to the Defra website is vague to say the least, which is why I think everyone I know who has a few chickens scratching round in a pen, or their garden, seems to assume that the alert does not apply to them.

That is if they even knew there was a threat to poultry from continental avian invaders carrying this nasty bug.

From what I gather, Defra has requested that keepers of poultry keep their birds inside for 30 days until the threat of migrating birds, carrying the debilitating flu, Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza or H5N8 as it is catchily phrased, passes for now.

Public Health England has not currently had any cases reported, and is, I presume, just taking wise precautions to ensure that everyone wanting a free range turkey for lunch on Christmas Day, gets one.

If you are buying a frozen bird, it was probably dispatched well before any chance of getting the flu anyway so do not worry.

So my chickens are sulking. Have virtually stopped laying in response to the change in their daily routine. I do not feel so bad about the hens kept in the luxury new hen house John built me as a Christmas present. They have plenty of room to fight among themselves and peck each other.

Hens in the other hen house, however, are starved of space, but I tell them the alternative is the chop. So just stop moaning and get back into the egg laying routine before I really do consign them to the roasting tin.

Which is the fate of all our young cockerels. I have put these birds in an old shed for the next week or two, and am feeding them a diet of poultry fattening crumbs.

Without the avian flu scare I would probably just let them roam and not bothered culling till the spring. Those migrating wild birds have a lot to answer for to their relatives in the poultry world.