I murdered a chicken.

And I'd do it again.

#7. Kill and Eat an Animal

I got there after a two-hour drive through the idyllic English countryside to Whitesmith, where the average house goes for just over a million. Every few minutes I was craning my neck towards the homely farms and imagining myself nestled between their old stone walls, fireplace crackling and a faithful sheepdog at my feet, worn and ragged like a favourite blanket.

Zoe, the smallholder who had promised to hook me up with a chicken (not like that), had given me directions to her farm, since the satnav wouldn’t bring me there. I slowed to a crawl and squinted at every sign I saw painted onto wooden slats until finally I found the right one. Zoe would be round the back, she’d said. I parked my Mini Cooper on the mud, swapped my Fred Perry trainers for wellington boots, and stepped past the muddy Land Rover halfway through repairs and past the sweeping farmhouse. A bright yellow digger sat next to a crater in the expansive earth; in a few weeks, it would be a rippling lake swimming with ducks and geese. I called out to the two figures up ahead on the soil. They were tending to a hutch of turkeys, the wobbly birds gobbling at the seed scattered around.

‘Hello, hello!’ beamed Zoe. She was warm and welcoming in a large woollen jumper, her hair tied up in a scarf. I would later learn she was stashing eggs within the heat of her bra. She greeted me with a big hug and an even bigger smile. She introduced me to her husband, Lindsay, intense blue eyes set into a weathered face.

After some small talk, Zoe ushered me over to the chicken coop, and made me pick the chicken I was to make kick the bucket, shuffle of this mortal coil, run down the curtain and join the choir invisible – the chicken I was to make into an ex-chicken.

‘Er,’ I hesitated, ‘Are any of them terminally ill? Or paedophiles?’

It was not an easy task. Zoe informed me the females had smaller combs, and the alpha had the biggest. Well, I certainly didn’t want to kill a female, and I couldn’t deprive them of their leader.

Zoe cooed softly at the chickens, disturbed at my presence in the coop. ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ she whispered, ‘They’re all for the chop Thursday anyway. Don’t tell them.’

I picked one at random and, with a little help, tucked in its wings and gently lifted its scrabbling feet from the dirt. I couldn’t look it in the eye. Zoe asked me if I wanted to give it a name.

‘No, no, no, I couldn’t possibly. God, no. How horrible. Oh wait - yes!’

I named him Ramesh, after my old landlord, who was trying to fuck me for £578 of my security deposit. Oh, I caused a wall-to-wall hairline fracture in the plasterboard by bumping into it, did I, Ramesh? Is that how that works? Or could it be the cold and the damp in your overpriced shitbox of a house, you grubby Dickensian creep?

I shuffled with Ramesh (the chicken) underarm into a shed. It smelled familiar, like a pet shop from my childhood. Probably on account of all the chicks cheeping away behind wire frames. Zoe nudged me towards a table with various instruments of death.

‘You can use the machine if you want. You just pop his head in there, pull the lever and – erck! Depersonalised. Like a Nazi gas chamber.’

No. I wanted to get hands on. I picked up an enormous machete from the table. It was like something you’d see on Brit Cops at 3pm on a Tuesday, found hidden behind a hedge on a Tottenham estate.

We took Ramesh inside to prepare. The farmhouse was spacious and modern– and crammed with animals, not all of them for eating. I sat in a plush dining-room nook; there was a flurry of activity from the cage of chicks on the table, a cat gazing at them languorously. Two enormous dogs shuffled along the floor by my feet, pushing their noses at my legs, and at Ramesh. He seemed disturbed, sensing predators. Little did he know.

I donned a blood red apron, and we marched back outside. I had Ramesh tucked under one arm, the machete dragging heavily in the other.

‘This would be a good stump,’ suggested Lindsay. While I wrestled with the chicken, he and Zoe debated over where I should do the deed – which tree stump would be the most scenic for the video they had presumed to take, and which still haunts my smartphone to this day (though in fairness, they did pick a scenic stump).

I held Ramesh by the legs, and gently lay him flat across the buzzcut surface of the log. I raised the machete in my other hand.

‘Thank you for your life and your flesh,’ I said. My heart was steady. I grimaced. I didn’t feel much of anything, but I didn’t want to hurt him either, I thought, as I looked down at him relaxing on the wood.

Thwump.

I missed its neck by a few inches, hacking into its back instead. With the first strike, it came alive, thrashing in a maelstrom of white feathers and frantic clucks. Now it would be even harder.

Thwump.

I had overcompensated. This time my aim was too high up and I skimmed its head. Its beak and face flopped onto the ground, staring up at me agape like a cheap Halloween mask. Still it flapped and writhed.

Thwump.

I hit the neck but failed to sever the head. Blood gushed onto my boots.

Thwump.

The back again.

Thwump.

Thwump.

Thwump-thwump

‘…I think it’s dead,’ ventured Lindsay.

Thwump.

Louder: ‘I think it’s dead!’

I paused. The head was hanging by a sinew. It probably was dead. Yet still the body twitched.

Thwump.

To my surprise, it had been hard to take a life. Physically, I mean, hacking away. Not mentally. Mentally, I felt fine. It was like water off a duck’s back / blood off a chicken’s face.

I didn’t feel anything, except a distant pang of guilt that I had made Ramesh’s final moments so brutal. Oh well – he was dead now. Lindsay had made sure of that, stepping in and slicing off the head with a well-practiced thwack.

Paid subscribers get to watch the video of me killing Ramesh! Scroll down to watch it.

We strung the body to a tree and plucked the feathers while it was still warm. Zoe and Lindsay were a delightful couple – two of the happiest and nicest people I had met for a while. The conversation flowed as easily as the blood from Ramesh’s gaping throat. They told me they had left the cosmopolitan world of business to start their farm a few years ago. The rat race was not fulfilling, they had said, and I concurred. They had been concerned about the way society was going – and I concurred. They must feel very smug, I suggested, with everything that’s happened recently, and knowing that they’d never have to scan a government-issued health passport at Tesco to buy their dinner. They concurred.

We took the chicken inside and Lindsay removed its guts onto a plate. All I had to compare it to was a Jeffrey Dahmer series I had recently watched on Netflix. The couple placed the meat into a butcher’s box and then I had to make my excuses and leave – the dog hairs were scratching my throat and making my eyes stream. I’m not cut out for country life, I reckoned. Not yet.

As for Ramesh, we made him into a roast dinner. He was fluffy, creamy, and tender. It was the best roast dinner I have ever had. We wasted nothing, turning his skin and bones into a soup – another treat.

So thank you, Ramesh (the chicken).

How about you, reader, would you kill your own dinner?

Perhaps you couldn’t kill a fly - or, perhaps you’d love to make one of those genius gorillas that speaks sign language beg for its life?

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Here is the video - for paying subscribers only!