Now you have spruced up your mud idol, you are probably in the mood to spruce up a few of your other appurtenances. You might have noticed that your hens are looking a bit tatty. It is difficult to work out why this is so, although the neglect into which you have allowed their coop to moulder may have something to do with it. It will probably be a good idea to spruce up the hen coop once you have spruced up the hens themselves, but that is a project for another day, one when it is not raining incessantly, and when a cold wind is not lashing across the yard in a corner of which the coop has been shoved, ramshackle and near collapse.

The best way to spruce up a hen is to paint its feathers with henna, obviously. Prepare a large tub of henna and get a paintbrush. Holding the hen in one hand, paint each individual feather with henna, and then replace the hen in the coop. Repeat until all your hens have been spruced up.

It may be that being painted enrages one or more of your hens and you may now suffer from lacerations made by their fierce beaks. Dab some sort of gooey antiseptic ointment upon the lacerations, swathe them in bandages, and go and lie down in a darkened room. Before you do so, don’t forget to clean the tub and the brushes with hot soapy water. If you do not have any hot water, or soap, you must be a filthy and unprepossessing person, quite unlike your hens, which are now smartly spruced with henna. Passers-by, if there are any, will do a double-take, wondering how so grimy a specimen as yourself has managed to accumulate a coop’s worth of such lovely hens. By such disjunctures is the world made that little bit more intriguing.