Six Geese a Laying - Christmas 2015

There is no bigger farmyard bastard than Geese.  Bad-tempered, always angry and happy to attack anyone without any reason - the goose is the unlicensed bouncer of the farmyard.  They're often used instead of guard dogs.   Guard dogs can be reasoned with but geese, like unlicensed nightclub bouncers, have no grasp of reason and only want to have a ruck.  Try getting into a farmyard without a check shirt, Hunter wellies and coloured corduroys and they'll be onto you like a shot and will take you round the back of a barn for a beating.  "Six Geese a Laying into some poor sod" is the full lyric from the original song.

Geese are bastards.  Their wing feathers are tattooed with 'love' on one side and 'hate' on the other* and they stomp around the farmyard, terrorising the other animals.  They run protection rackets and extort food from the other animals through blackmail and violence.  Geese in the farmyard means a reign of terror.

The original version of Orwell's Animal Farm had the geese in the role of the pigs.  However, Orwell based it on real farmyard observations and found that the geese were simply too evil even for the Napoleon role.  He had to drop geese from the whole story.   Geese are bastards - if you haven't eaten one for Christmas, do so now.




*Humans (and geese)  having 'Love' and 'Hate' on the knuckles is an odd idea.  I get the 'hate' side but what sort of love can you express with knuckles - apart from 'self love'? I reckon it'd be much better to have 'wank' tattooed on the right knuckles and 'wipe' tattooed on the left knuckles.   It's so easy to get mixed up - this sort of aide memoir would help a lot.