Blurb

(clears throat)

Blingle Farm
Large barn eggs
Blingle Farm hens live in spacious barns where they are free to roam, perch and dust bathe as part of their natural behaviour. They are fed a cereal based diet enriched with corn and wheat.

That's the blurb off the top of an egg box which a neighbour gave me to put his eggs in, and that's exactly how it reads except that I've changed the farm name. Without wishing to go into the ins and outs of egg production, I'm interested in the blurb (that's the flavour text used to describe the contents of the box). You have to be honest in the text otherwise the Advertising Standards Authority comes and tells you you're a very naughty boy, but that still leaves a lot of room for a wily copy editor to play.

For instance, the use of the word 'barn'. This has no precise technical meaning but manages to convey, to the naïve, an image of a moderately-sized red-painted structure with a hayloft, from which bare-footed urchins swing on a rope to land in a haycart, squealing with delight. The barn is open at the front and the farmyard chickens wander in and out, chasing the occasional butterfly. One suspects this is not the case. Furthermore the barn can be as spacious as it likes, even in bold text, and still look a bit cramped once you bung four thousand chickens into it. I could go on – even to point of asking how a diet could be based on cereals if you left out the corn and wheat, without actually becoming porridge – but I won't.

The point here is the skill of blurb writing. Ever had a go? I once revamped the menu of a gastropub run by a fierce Irish friend of mine, after finding her sitting on a bar stool chewing the end of a pencil and looking greatly troubled. When asked what was wrong, she said 'No-one's eating the mussels. I've had to throw most of them away again. Perhaps we should stop doing them...'

I took a look at the menu. It said, in an unappealing impact font, 'a pint of mussels'. I thought that perhaps I wouldn't have ordered that.

'Hmm,' says I, 'I think I can see your problem. What do you serve them with?'

'Lettuce, a bit of wheaten bread, and some sauce,' says Mrs Fierce.

'What sort of sauce?'

'Don't know. It's Liam's, but he won't tell anyone what he puts in it. It's not bad, but it's a bit... orange.'

'And where do you get the mussels from?'

'Ardglass.'

'Wasn't there a rumour that Van Morrison was sitting in here when he wrote Coney Island?'

'Was there?' Mrs Fierce asks, all excited. I shrug. There is now, Mrs F will see to it. Ten minutes later the menu is reworked, and a marginal note warns Liam to use a different font so that his menu won't actually alarm the diners. It now reads; 'Coney Island Mussels - A good pint of Ardglass mussels, served with Liam's secret sauce on a bed of crisp lettuce and fresh wheaten bread.'

It's important not to overdo these things, otherwise you end up with things like 'Subtly crisp medallions of rare-breed pork loin with red onion and five-spice marmalade, accented with a bruised raspberry and cinnamon jus' (can't remember where I ate this, but I remember how disappointing it was after the droolsome intro).

Sales did much better after that, Mrs Fierce told me; you get the idea now. To give me something to chortle at, if you keep chickens why not write the blurb for your own eggs? Here's mine.

Hedgewizard's Hollow Eggs*
All-sized funny-little-house-on-legs eggs
Hollow hens live in high-rise accommodation where they are free to scratch about, dig to China, peck the arse off each other and occasionally escape to eat the contents of the polytunnel as part of their natural behaviour. They are theoretically fed on organic chicken feed, but in practice eat all sorts of things including weeds from the veg patch, low-hanging pears, bumblebees and even the odd mouse.



*The eggs aren't actually hollow, and neither is Hedgewizard – the place is in a bit of dip, is all. I could easily have called it something else, all right? God, you people.