We are both notional bird fanciers, R especially since his earliest years as a little r breeding budgies and canaries, so when our friend Tenoch informed us that she was covering the regional bird show as part of her journalism course we were enthusiastic accomplices.  Bird shows are like catnip and indeed crack cocaine to the aspiring fowl enthusiast.

​It's an old-school scene undergoing something of a renaissance with the increasing popularity of domestic poultry in general and fancy breeds in particular.  We're pleased to witness any trend that might reconnect urban people with their fellow creatures and remind them of our relation to, and reliance upon other species.  

Perhaps you don't care for the thought of birds in small cages; neither do we, but the ones you see here are just judging units designed to keep stress to a minimum on these two days a year when the birds are assembled for the purposes of highly particular comparison. 

LEFT  Unknown ginger Bantam- possibly an Old English Game.  ABOVE  a fine Rosecomb Bantam, one of my favourite varieties and possible future feathered friend. 

ABOVE LEFT another Silkie mister.  The smaller breeds seemed to be the freest with their remarks and walking around a hall packed with competitive roosters of every description is not a sound one soon forgets.  The heavy birds tend to be baritones, producing rich, almost laconic crows while some of the little guys have shrill, gurgling and peculiarly disorganized outbursts that once again recall their saurian forerunners.  

ABOVE RIGHT a splendid Rhode Island Red rooster.  They might be the archetypal chicken but there is nothing basic about this breed; the lustre of their mahogany and peacock-green plumage is difficult to capture in this crap light.  

LEFT a stoic Barred Plymouth Rock rooster.  The difference in temperament between breeds and individual birds was very apparent; we didn't photograph the ones that seemed to object to our proximity. 

BELOW  I think this is the Pyle strain of Old English Game and is apparently very prestigious.

ABOVE  a Welsummer hen?  I know we're getting this wrong, again- sorry about that.

On to the ducks.  

ABOVE  We were confronted by a wall of white Penkins who had a lot to say about their confinement, all the other ducks they were going to beat down, the inferior status of chickens and the inadequacy of their human servitors.  Walking past these ducks made us feel like hapless junior defence lawyers negotiating the Aryan Nation section of the death row gauntlet.  There were extremely serious threat displays and a shitload of rage-quacking.

RIGHT the exquisite American Wood Duck, Anas sponsa.  There was a lovely pair on show, the first we had ever seen in the flesh; this is the cock bird.  Their colouration is vividly and almost arbitrarily ornamental and yet this is a wild-type animal with very little human intervention in its appearance.  It's great to be able to say this species is doing well after a concerted conservation effort across the US mainland that brought it back from serious decline.

Muscovy Ducks, Cairina moschata.  I could have sworn these strange fowl were cooked up by some mad duck-altering wattle fanatic but they are actually a species native to South America. They are enormous and pretty phlegmatic in comparison with the angry, entitled Pekins.

The Cage Bird category, home of the budgie, canary and finches etc. There were some seriously dope high-end budgies in the house but this pied guy to the right was the shit if you're asking me.  BELOW AND BOTTOM RIGHT the undeniably spectacular Ringneck Parrot, who, like many people, are ideal companions until they open their mouths.  Despite their metal-scraping shriek, they're a charming and extremely intelligent bird and the sweet moves in this male Ringneck's courting display should be an inspiration to us all.

- Re the contemporaneous charge of misogyny (though I see that once-popular stance has given way to universal acclaim now that the poor bugger's dead).  I didn't think McQueen was a misogynist back in the day and I'm even less convinced of it now.  He admired, befriended, consulted and employed women.  In his rejection of feminine aesthetic norms he both empathised with the ferocity of our desire to kick away the deadweight of tradition and dared to express the darker ghost of that aspiration; the self loathing and masochism of victimhood, into which he had been initiated courtesy of the sexual abuse he experienced as a child.  In his sexuality he was formatively monstered and discounted- just like we are.  McQueen knew what it was like to have to eat shit and shut up and smile like a good girl.  

His work and its performance expressed all that angst, contempt, violence, fragility, sarcasm and hypocrisy alongside celebratory grandeur and this is not anitfemale- it is honest.  Like it or not, women are still deformed by the weight of all those oppressive millennia.  I personally find the work most derided in Eshu and La Poupée incredibly valuable in its vicious, unapologetic bulldozing of traditional notions of beauty and believe that is precisely why people were so fucking determined to characterise it as derogatory.  They were mad at his pissing all over pretty, as though this sick convention was the most precious thing imaginable.  As a woman, I feel the gross confines of pretty like a plastic bag around my head and take solace in living outside it, in solidarity with other creatures, in our rhythmic affinity with the organic world.  McQueen celebrated this in virtually everything he produced.
​
To me it seems obvious that his own wish to escape the physical cards he had been dealt was utterly and perversely seminal to his aesthetic.  McQueen yearned with the diametric vehemence of the incorrigible self-loather to be everything his body was not- thin, athletic, ethereal, elongate- subjecting himself to the kind of excoriations only too familiar to women for far too long.  That he could not apply his boundless talents to celebrating personal diversity, to the very things he lamented about himself is hardly surprising and ultimately pretty forgivable.

​It is painfully ironic to consider the sort of compassionate, comprehensive self-acceptance that can come to those of us who make it into our forties, knowing it will forever be denied to the people who did not survive its absence.

How powerful that realisation might have been to someone like Lee Alexander McQueen.  RIP.

His insane lurch from chunky indolence to running a charity marathon a day for I think the entire length of England was perhaps the only sort of batshit fuck-yeah example that could have helped propel me from my own similarly fat, louche stasis. One doesn't have to be a slender whippet to enjoy terrifyingly kinetic half-bestial health and I owe that realisation in part to this dubious and exceptional transvestite.

As a fellow spark of dainty luminous femininity trapped in the body of a big butch bitch, let me correct the oversight that was my omission of la Izzard from this catalogue of androgenic excellence. Sarcastic men in frocks are one of my favourite things ever.

Eddie would be my spirit animal if I believed in the necessity of remedial transubstantiation. Which I do not.  

​Everything is everything.

That brings me tremendous joy.
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I prefer his earlier, bitchier work to the sort of stadium-pleasing recitals he does now, but whatever- I'd still still exploit him physically if I ever caught him in a vulnerable moment.  

​Lol.

 < I got the make your own choice of slabs box and a random selection of truffles.

R loves dark and I have broad tastes, so it was great to be able to compose our own mix.  His standout: Dark+candied peel. Mine- white+fig.  8.5/10

One of the best ways to really put an unfamiliar food purveyor to the test is to order something you wouldn't normally choose, and in accordance with that principle I picked out both a boysenberry and a passionfruit truffle.  Fruit truffles are something I steer clear of because the ancient trauma of Cadbury Strawberry Roses is a scar that never heals.  Am I right, fellow Commonwealthians?

I also judge a chocolate house on its caramel.