Last night one of our chickens didn’t come home to roost – Dusty went missing. They NEVER go missing at night. It’s simple, it gets dark, they go home to roost. It never varies, they never fancy a night on the tiles or a trip to the pub, they just go home to bed when it’s dark. We thought she’d been got.

This morning, I had an email from DM to say that when he went out to feed the hens, he found Dusty standing outside the henhouse looking and sounding extremely narked to be on the outside when she was supposed to be on the inside.

This evening, I came home from Uni to find my indoor family (DM, JD and Lola) all missing in action – no sign of any of them, just a sack of spuds and The Phil Spector Christmas Album on the CD player. It was eerie. There was no excited ro-ro-ing from Lola, no sweetness from JD and no DM waiting for me so no sloppy kisses on the doorstep.

I came in, went upstairs to put my stuff away and mooched about a bit before DM came inside. He’d “been outside feeding the dogs”. Oh yeah. That’s why there was no yipping or ro-ro-ing then eh???!!!

I’m reading Skullduggery Pleasant at the moment (a very sweet and kind reading parcel from my nephew, more of which another day) and the heroine has a special mirror where a facsimile of herself climbs through the mirror when she wants to go on a cosmic mission and pretends to be her for a few days while she’s gone – do you see what I mean – fake heroine keeps family happy and in the dark about the whereabouts of their precious offspring.

Now call me old-fashioned but first Dusty goes missing then reappears as calm as you like, then the rest of the family do likewise. Are the ones now sat in my sitting room real or facsimile? I don’t know. What’s puzzling me though is where the spuds came from…