Lucifer - What's good for the saucy gander

The farmer wasn’t keen on keeping a gander or even increasing his flock but one morning an egg rolled towards his feet and he was reminded of a quote by his favourite author, Oscar Wilde, ‘An egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different.’ 

It looked like a good egg so he enlisted a nearby hen to keep it warm. In time it cracked and grew into a brawny gander, strong and curious and when it was mature enough he named it Lucifer and employed it to work in his sauce factory.

The farmer had, in recent years, fallen on hard times, selling the last of his worthless flock of sheep for pennies. He had ideas of diversification and he knew that he could never plough a field by turning it over in his mind so he set up a factory, making sauce from his tarragon crop. A secret recipe transferred to him through his grandmother in her final moments. Some of the details of the recipe were lost in translation since she was sucking an egg at the time. Furthermore, to give her grandson the exact ingredients was at odds with her core belief that a little learning was a dangerous thing. None of it mattered, the farmer was poor and hunger makes the best sauce.

Following Brexit and the increase of the minimum wage, the farmer was unable to employ real humans so he trained his flock of geese to pull the tarragon crop from the earth, together with spring onions and feed the ingredients into a blending machine. Lucifer, being so big and strong, was employed at the other end of the machine in the bottling department. The business was just a start up but tasting had gone down well at the county show and it is a fact that a farmer is always going to be rich next year.

Lucifer was instructed to focus on the bottling machine, lifting the bottles with his huge beak to catch the liquid. He was warned not to fraternise with the rest of the gaggle who were all female and able to gossip at full output while working at full output. At first he tried very hard to concentrate and he did well. The farmer was pleased but he warned Lucifer, ‘keep your eyes straight ahead, ignore all sideshow distractions’.

The female geese were buxom and beautiful, they fluttered their long eyelashes at him as they chattered away, tearing at the herbal ingredients, arching their slender necks like prima ballerinas. Lucifer tried not to look at them since he knew that even a few seconds of lost concentration would result in a puddle of sauce on the floor of the barn. But forbidden fruit is the sweetest and the beautiful young geese played like an orchestra in the fantasy room of his imagination. Lucifer began to lose concentration. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, the sauce backed up as the bottles were not lined up fast enough to hold them.

‘He who hesitates is lost!’, shouted Pamela, one of the more mature geese as Lucifer sat motionless, gazing at Joanna, one of the more youthful geese, fluffy with piercing blue eyes and huge red feet.

The farmer walked in just as the sauce began to ooze out onto the floor of the barn and all over Lucifers, wide orange feet. The farmer rolled his eyes and nodded at his old dobbin who was standing beside the bottling machine with his bad eye facing them but a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse and he simply whinnied, bared his teeth and pulled some hay from his feeding net.

‘If you want something doing right, do it yourself!’ the farmer chastised and he sent Lucifer away, flapping and honking in a bluster of shame.

The shift ended and the farmer scattered the grain down for his birds who had worked hard, all except for Lucifer who hadn’t earned his crust that day and was served half measures. The next day the farmer put up a screen around the bottling area so that the lady geese were out of sight, out of mind but a hungry man smells meat far and Lucifer continued to be distracted at work. He was fully grown up now and had found his voice, he took to honking incessantly while bottling the sauce. 

The other geese continued to work hard and didn’t complain about Lucifer since they liked him and he was doing his best to knuckle down for the farmer because he didn’t want to fall out with his bread and butter and he’d realised that the only free cheese is in the mousetrap. He honked to drown out his desire to be with the females and to help him focus on the bottling machine.

The farmer was a brave and persistent man and while the geese worked the sauce factory he went out peddling his sauce to supermarket executives. Inspired by Lucifer’s antics, he changed its name to Saucy Gander’s Tarragon Trickle and it went down a treat in the upmarkets establishments where the posh folk were always thinking saucy thoughts.

The farmer was finally able to make a living and employ real people to operate the sauce factory. Lucifer turned out to be the goose that laid the golden egg, only metaphorically speaking since he was a gander, however he was the inspiration behind the name. What’s in a name? Well, as it turned out, a good name is better than precious ointment.

The geese were turned out onto the farmyard to guard the premises and peck around enjoying early retirement. Lucifer took four wives,Trudy, Linda, Bree and May; sadly he was unable to marry Joanna because of a little known proverb, Never marry a woman who has bigger feet than you. 

The farmer was careful to make hay while the sun shines and feathered his nest by selling as much sauce as possible while people had enough money in their pockets to buy it. Later when folk became poor and the weather harsher, he was planning to diversify with turnip production.