Separate vegetable dishes included a commendable mustard mash

Separate vegetable dishes included a commendable mustard mash. Our pudding was a decent pear-and-almond tart; and the bill, a faintly indecent pounds 67 with wine and 50p cover charges - a little steep for a local pub-restaurant.Will the Cod live to define another era? Not if it's aiming at discerning foodies. Yet if the nice-but-dim chap I encountered in the loos is anything to go by ("Is this the ladies? I've been in here twice already tonight!"), its future as a local is assured.Admiral Codrington, 17 Mossop Street, London SW3 (0171-581 0005)PUB GRUBThe Windsor Castle 114 Campden Hill Rd, W8 (0171-243 9551) Memorable sausage and mashCholmondeley Riverside Cressage, Shropshire (01952 510900) Unusual fare such as asparagus with smoked salmon and mousseline sauceThe Woodbridge North Newnton, Wilts (01980 630266) Excellent Mexican food. The ancient Greeks had a phrase for it: the words meeden agan - nothing in excess - were inscribed on the wall of the temple at Delphi as a precept for life in general, and they remain a pretty good one to this day. But how do you interpret them when your free-range chickens are being written off by predators? Our chickens are - or rather, have been - truly free-range: at night they are securely shut in, but during the day they march about the farmyard and up the fields, supplementing their basic fare of corn and kitchen scraps with worms, grubs, grass and other delicacies, all of which impart incomparable flavour and colour to their eggs. The principal enemies of the enterprise are foxes, which live in the wood on the escarpment above our fields. On these fine summer evenings they come out to take the air and sit there gazing down, like diners in a restaurant keenly surveying the menu.

Never mind that the hedgerows are hopping with juicy young rabbits; it is the chickens they are fancying.So long as their natural caution makes them hold off until dusk, all is well; by then we have the chickens safely closeted. It is the daylight raid that causes havoc - and over the past few months we have suffered repeated diurnal attacks. One by one our flock has been whittled down.Six weeks ago we were down to three birds - Gandhi the Brahmah cockerel, his spouse Mrs Gandhi, and one other hen, Whitey Next Whitey vanished, leaving not a feather. For a while we hoped she might have gone broody and be incubating a clutch of eggs - but no such luck. We never saw her again.Then one morning, as we were having breakfast, there came a fearful screech. We rushed outside, and there in the yard was a big dog fox, making off with Gandhi in his jaws. My wife let out such a yell that the raider dropped his burden and bolted.

The cockerel was miraculously unharmed; his plumage is so terrific that all the fox got was a mouthful of feathers. Nevertheless, Gandhi was in shock, and had to retire to his sleeping-quarters for a couple of hours to recover.Soon after that Mrs Gandhi did go broody, sitting on a single egg of her own. So we hastily procured some more eggs and slipped them under her in a secluded coop. She sat on them steadfastly, only coming off to snatch a bite of food and a drink for a few minutes every morning.

But then, to our consternation, we found that her clutch was steadily diminishing from its original 12. The thief could only be a rat - but how was it getting at the eggs? It had no chance at night, when the solid front of the coop was in place, and we realised belatedly that it must be coming during the day, burrowing through the straw and filching eggs from underneath the sitting hen.Rats are repulsive creatures. Not only do they carry disease and destroy whole buildings with their burrowing. They are also cannibals; often, if I kill one in a spring trap during the night, I find it half-eaten by friends or (worse) relations in the morning. I have even known them gnaw away the leg of a broody hen.At least Mrs Gandhi was not chewed up.