By Tom Rawstorne for the Daily Mail

Published: 20:44 EDT, 3 September 2015 | Updated: 04:11 EDT, 4 September 2015

Friday night at 9.30pm and I am standing in the back garden of our house sporting Perspex safety goggles, my hands protected by heavy-duty gardening gloves. By my side I have two rolls of gaffer tape and a large cardboard box.

I turn to my 13-year-old daughter Amelia and once again run through the plan: ‘You’ll open the door. I’ll grab Geoff. We get him in the box. And then...’

I pause. I’m detecting a lack of focus. So I raise my goggles and in the darkening gloom fix her with a steely glare.

Up to a million British households have chickens, making the hen the sixth most popular domestic pet. As a result, home egg production in Britain is hitting levels not seen since the Fifties

‘Look,’ I continue. ‘If this goes wrong then the fact I’m your father goes out of the window. It’s every man for himself.’

So much for gallantry. But as I’m about to go mano-a-mano with Geoff — my large, angry, over-sexed cockerel — there is simply no room for sentiment.

That I found myself in this ludicrous position was, perhaps, entirely predictable. 

Because, like an increasingly large number of my fellow countrymen, I’d pretty much convinced myself that I had somehow become a fully-fledged farmer.

Up to a million households have chickens, making the hen the sixth most popular domestic pet. As a result, home egg production in Britain is hitting levels not seen since the Fifties. 

And, inevitably, a whole industry has sprung up to cater for this new breed of poultry fancier.

As with all middle-class hobbies, there’s no limit to how much money you can blow on it. Our designer hen house — an Eglu cube made by a company called Omlet — costs north of £500. 

It’s made of moulded plastic, comes in a palette of primary colours and has retractable wheels that allow you to move it around the garden.

Tom Rawstorne insisted that his family kept one of their two cockrels - and that he would be called Geoff, a good, no-nonsense, manly name (file image)

As for the chickens, when I started out ten years ago you could pick them up for little more than a fiver. 

Now, cashing in on demand, your bog standard brown hen will set you back £15 or more.

Cough up a bit more and you can put together a flock that will lay eggs in the sort of pastel colours normally found in the Farrow & Ball colour chart. 

Add in the feed — £7.50 for a sack of pellets that four hens will work their way through in three weeks — and it goes without saying that it takes months if not years before Chicken Licken earns her corn in eggs. (From the age of about 18 weeks to about two or so years, chickens lay an egg a day.)

So when my daughters nagged me to hatch some chicks, I was easily persuaded. For starters, they would be free.

I borrowed an incubator from a friend who also supplied me with five eggs to hatch. 

And, sure enough, 21 days later five tiny, fluffy, perfect little chickens emerged from their shells. 

For the first couple of weeks we kept them in a cardboard box under a heat lamp in the sitting room, watching as they’d totter around before slumping beak-down into an exhausted heap.

But as ever, little things grow up. And, as is nature’s way, you’re going to get a mix of boy and girl chicks. 

Because sexing chicks is difficult, I was able to ignore this fact until they were a good few months old. 

Only then did it became evident (by their size) that of the five, two were cockerels.

The sensible thing would have been to get rid of them there and then. 

After all, you don’t need a cockerel for your hens to lay — they will quite happily do so without a male in attendance.

But then I started to think. I live in an all-female household — a wife and three daughters.

Even the dog, Dolly, is a girl.

So, ignoring my wife Charlotte’s warnings that a cockerel might be more trouble than he was worth, I decided to put my foot down.

I insisted that we keep one. And that he would be called Geoff, a good, no-nonsense, manly name.

The first hint of trouble came when I attempted to get rid of the other fella, who friends offered to take. 

While I managed to bundle him into a cardboard box easily enough, Geoff clearly thought his cards were also marked.

He became so flustered that he took off in vertical flight, clearing the hedge and landing in the next-door farmer’s field. 

It took me an hour to chase him back. How I wish I hadn’t bothered.

Because from the age of six months, Geoff did what cockerels do and started to crow. 

When his blood is up — which is pretty much every waking second of the day — Geoff likes to go prowling round his flock, waiting to have his wicked way with them. Once he’s done the deed, he digs in his back claws, pulling out their feathers and inflicting bloody wounds in the process

Without fail, every single dawn this summer I have been woken by Geoff.

It’s not even a nice cock-a-doodle-do, more a rasping, broken-voiced scream. 

Most mornings I lie in bed dreaming of ways to silence him. And he doesn’t stop at breakfast. On and on throughout the day he delivers his ear-shattering repertoire.

Equally annoying is Geoff’s complete lack of brain. If we’re going away and I need to put the hens in their house early, I chuck some feed inside their pen — which is enclosed on all sides — they run in after it and I lock them in. 

All the girls get it. It’s pretty simple. Not Geoff. Oh no. He just runs around and around and around.

On one Friday, my wife was due to join me in London for a night out. 

All she had to do was lock up the hens and go. But Geoff was having none of it. 

For two hours she tried to bribe him, cajole him, chase him — an exercise in futility charted in the bad-tempered text messages she sent to me.

In the end he did finally deign to put himself to bed, but remains so traumatised that even the sight of my wife’s brown hair triggers another burst of manic crowing.

But the final straw was the damage Geoff was doing to the hens. When his blood is up — which is pretty much every waking second of the day — he’s prowling round his flock, waiting to have his wicked way with them.

Once he’s done the deed, he digs in his back claws, pulling out their feathers and inflicting bloody wounds in the process.

Looking on the internet for a fix, I discover that this is a common problem and one way to protect a hen is to fit her with a leather ‘saddle’ that fits over her back.

No doubt it works. But if life is too short to stuff a mushroom, it’s almost also certainly too short to saddle a hen.

So I decided that Geoff had to go. I first came to this realisation about a month ago as I sat slumped over my desk with exhaustion after another Geoff-induced early start.

I thought the solution was pretty simple, but when I texted my wife from work to tell her that I was going to wring the little blighter’s neck that evening, the news didn’t go down very well at all.

Another few weeks of the crowing and Tom was at the end of my tether, so he  phoned several friends with chickens until he  managed to persuade one to take Geoff on

She told me it was barbaric to kill him and that the children would be upset. They’d held baby Geoff in their hands.

And sure enough, when I gently ran it past the trio, telling them that maybe Geoff would be happier in the big farmyard in the sky, the youngest, five, stared at me, wide-eyed and said: ‘But we’re his parents. We can’t kill him.’

Next, I toyed with the idea of just ‘forgetting’ to shut Geoff in one night — then perhaps Freddie Fox would do my dirty work for me.

But having seen what a chicken massacre looks like (we once had four decapitated by a fox in one night), I decided I didn’t have the stomach for that.

Another few weeks of the crowing and I was at the end of my tether, so I phoned several friends with chickens until I managed to persuade one to take Geoff on. (The friend in question’s branched out into pigs, so he’s clearly more the farmer than I am).

What I didn’t count on, however, was how hard it would be even to catch our canny cockerel. I knew there was no way I could attempt it during the day — Geoff is way too flighty and, when cornered, can be outright aggressive.

So I decided my best bet was to wait until night, when he would be roosting. And that is how I found myself out in the garden in full protective gear, with my teenage daughter in tow.

Our plan? To creep up on a sleeping Geoff and put him in a cardboard box ready for deportation.

At first, all goes swimmingly. I open the lid of the Eglu, catch Geoff by surprise, jam him into the box and then close the flaps on the top. But we fumble too long with the tape. He spots a gap and launches himself upwards to freedom in an explosion of squawks and flailing claws.

And, as happened when he last encountered a cardboard box, he can’t get far enough away, heading out of the enclosure and across the neighbouring field.

I’m annoyed. But at the same time relieved that he’s gone. If you want to chance it in the wild, Geoff, so be it. Good luck to you. And so I go to bed. But not for long. 

Because at 4.30am — earlier than ever — I’m woken. By Geoff.

He’s back, standing on the top of the coop and cock-a-doodle-do-ing his little heart out. And more than ever before, it sounds less like a tune — and more like a taunt. 

As if to say, there’s only one male ruling the roost at our place — and it sure as hell ain’t me.

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