Michael Harding: Sitting out on the street in the middle of any town is an education

I know what a duck egg is. I see lots of them in shops nowadays; big white shells with bits of duck shite attached, or a flake of straw in the egg box. We never had ducks when I was young, but the back garden was cordoned off with a high wire fence and a hut within the compound was home to a flock of hens who were mostly pleasant, although not a blade of grass grew through the mud and chicken poo.

I loved watching Dáithí Lacha on television, imagining that I might some day become a fluent Irish speaker, and I asked my mother why we couldn’t have ducks instead of chickens. It would have been easier to learn Irish if we had ducks who spoke the language.

She made what I called her “ik” face; a grimace reserved for Benny Hill jokes, and she said ducks were dirty. I could only guess what she meant.

Nowadays duck eggs are everywhere, and I suppose the occasional fleck of straw in the box and a daub of shite on the shell may indicate authenticity; eggs dropped perhaps that morning from the backside of a free-range bird.

The duck egg is much bigger than a chicken egg, but I never knew there was such a thing as “baby hen eggs”, half the size of a normal egg. I saw them at a market in Dunfanaghy, Co Donegal, recently and I asked the man behind the stall about them.

Lots of flashy cars and jeeps with white leather seats were scattered around the town, indicating a footfall of swanky visitors. I wondered if the little eggs might be from quails or blackbirds or some other exotic species favoured by the owners of the sparkling Range Rovers. But as with everything else since I left primary school, I was completely wrong.

“Those is baby hen eggs,” the man explained tersely. And embarrassed by my own ignorance I slithered away. So I never got to find out what he meant by “baby hens”; did he mean young hens, or was there some breed of miniature hen which I was not aware of?

Couple of whiting

I needed a couple of whiting from Jack’s Fresh Fish van and I thought I might get an answer from him. Jack is a friend and I would ask him any question I wanted without embarrassment, but there was a queue around his van so I held my tongue.

Instead I had a coffee on the street where two French women were smoking cigarettes and a pony-tailed man of my own vintage was trying to manage his sunglasses and a latte on a rickety table. I sensed he may have been recovering from a wild night of “ceol agus craic” somewhere in west Donegal and was still perhaps trying to find his way home.

Then suddenly a woman appeared before me and said,

“Can you see me?”

And because I have faith in the invisible world I wondered was she a manifestation of some heavenly realm.

“Do I know you?” I wondered.

“You’re wearing sun glasses,” she said.

“I’m an optimist,” I replied, “I was expecting the sun to shine around noon.”

Radio retina

“I thought maybe your eyes were still healing,” she said. “I heard you on the radio talking about your detached retina. And I wanted to tell you that I had laser surgery on both eyes.”

“Both eyes,” I repeated. “Astonishing.”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s fantastic. I can see my husband vividly for the first time in 20 years.”

“That could be challenging,” I suggested.

“It’s neither here nor there,” she said. “But I just wanted to tell you that you should consider laser treatment.”

Then I asked her if she could solve a puzzle for me.

“Shoot!” she replied.

“Ducks,” says I, “lay big eggs. But that stall over yonder is selling eggs the size of small marbles. I’m wondering where they come from.”

She looked shocked and happy at the same time, like someone who had just dodged a bus.

“You’ve asked the right person,” she whispered as she sat down beside me. And to be honest I didn’t notice an hour passing as she went on about cock eggs and witches eggs, fairy eggs and windy eggs, and how a baby hen is not a breed but simply a young chick that lays eggs with no yokes. And it occurred to me that sitting out on the street in the middle of any town is, as the General often says, an education.