My rubber chicken is crumbling. This is my third rubber chicken now and I have had a rubber chicken on my desk at work for 10 years. Frightening really.

Do you want to know why? Well at first it was just because I happened to think that rubber chickens were quite funny in a 'through funny and out the other side into funny' again sort of way. Ironic - that's the word. Then the director of the company I was working for sent me a memo requesting that I take my rubber chicken home because it was 'not befitting to the work environment' which I thought was sublimely hilarious, and I refused to comply. This started off a whole chain of events which eventually led to said director practically threatening to dismiss me because I had a rubber chicken on my desk, and me inviting him to explain that to an Industrial Tribunal at which point he backed down and the Rubber Chicken (now with leading captials) became an emblem of freedom for me forever more. I swore that day that I would always have a Rubber Chicken on my desk at work to keep me in touch with reality and remind me to fight for my individuality...and thus here I am to day still holding true to that oath.

But Rubber Chickens are, unsurprisingly, made of rubber. Rubber degrades, especially in an environment full of ozone from printers and such. Thus, that first pioneering chicken went all crispy and hard quite a few years ago and now its all twisted and deformed like a peat bog person (a bog chicken) and I keep it in a box in my loft. Its name is Ken Tucky. The second rubber chicken ('Bouncy McNuggets') got donated to a friend to keep in the back of their car as a mascot but I'm told this has also gone crispy now and is in a retirement home for spent chickens, to be replaced by a nodding Churchill. And the third rubber chicken ('Gavin') was given to me as a leaving present in my previous place of work, and is the present day chicken that is just starting to go a bit crispy round the edges.

I'm nervous at the prospect of a new chicken. We've got that whole irksome bedding in period again where we get to know one another and have to get used to each others funny quirks - I'm getting too old for this. I want just one chicken that I know I can settle down with for good. Would it be so bad to get a Rubber Substitute Chicken instead...?