SOMEWHERE in among the piles of discarded Christmas wrapping paper lies an envelope with £100 in it, or so my daughter tells me.

The piles of paper themselves are crunched in a heap in the grain barn, ready to act as starting fuel for a bonfire in the paddock consisting of rooted up hedge from where the new fruit trees have been planted.

It is just the kind of panic news I love to hear when I was ready to flop last night in front of the fire in the sitting room. Good job not the fire in the paddock.

Of course, the envelope may not necessarily be there at all. It could be in among the discarded rubbish in the dustbin. Dustbins, I mean. As the garbage has not been collected since before Christmas there is a lot of it. It is another job I can't wait to get going on today, emptying the bins to root round looking for a "small white envelope mum".

Apparently it was very nearly safely left on the sideboard of my daughter's home as they left to come down for the festivities.

But then it occurred to her that I would be more than willing to cook meals, clean up, look after grandchildren and do all the outside jobs while they went shopping on Boxing Day and the day after and the day after. Of course, I was. Love it. Christmas fun.

But today is also going to be a sort out day for the chickens. We are going to separate out all the cockerels hatched last year and put them in my new hen house/fattening shed/ final destination gulag.

It has not always been possible to clearly define hens from cockerels till recently in the young birds, but it is now. Anything capable of laying an egg will go in the big closed in run and old hen house. And had better start laying soon.

I am not an unreasonable person. I know that free range hens do go off laying when the daylight hours shorten and I, or rather John, am not prepared to install lights in the hen house to artificially stimulate egg production.

But with no indication yet on this avian flu job as to whether it is advisable to let all my chickens roam free, they are eating a fortune in grain and not showing a lot for it.

Normally they would be pecking and rootling around alongside the cattle in the foldyard, truffling in the sheep's troughs, choosing where they fancied laying an egg in the haystacks. An unfettered, carefree life, one where if they wished they could even choose to pop an egg into a pile of crumpled up festive wrapping paper, which was once the case several years ago. Hens can choose the daftest places to lay.

Today, however, all I am hoping to turn up is not an egg but a small, crumpled envelope. Finders keepers I say. As if.