Everyone’s getting jumpy about bird ‘flu nowadays. It’s the top story on TV news almost every day. We’ve become a race of ornithologists.

Here in England, we call bird-watchers “twitchers”. An appropriate name since everyone’s very twitchy over birds right now.

Not surprising perhaps: the latest European case of bird ‘flu in wild birds was discovered just 70 miles away from Syntagma Towers, across the English Channel in northern France. It really is that close.

Yesterday, a peculiar incident occurred here, one that was unsettling for a number of reasons. The cause of this incident? : a chicken.

I was inadvertently responsible for the event, which saw our quiet, semi-rural area invaded by a whole squad of police officers. Here’s the story:

I went out in the morning as usual to get my daily newspaper. As I passed through the back garden gate into the lane beyond, I saw a chicken — a Rhode Island Red for any twitchers among us. It was walking down the lane away from me and looked rather lost. We get a lot of pheasants and other game birds around here, but I’d never seen a domestic fowl in the lane before.

On the other side of the lane there’s an enclosed field of an acre or two. I assumed the bird had got up on the wall and fluttered down. Normally, I would have picked it up and thrown it back over, but something stopped me. I’d read that bird ‘flu can’t be passed to humans through the air, but is mainly caught by direct contact with their wings and droppings. If the hen was infected, picking the thing up might have been fatal, especially as the bird seemed disorientated.

So, I walked slowly behind it as it clucked and hopped — alarmed at my presence — out into the road. Off I went to the shop, thinking it would find its own way back to the field.

When I returned ten minutes later, the road was full of policemen in urgent conflab, some doing house-to-house calls. I should point out that if your home is burgled these days, you’ll be lucky to get a single cop for hours. Now here was an army of them mustering for a single chicken.

Had I been transported into a Wallace and Grommit movie? Or an Aesop Fable? It’s now clear to me that if you want the police to call, just cry fowl. The authorities around here are as twitchy as the twitchers.

Will this really turn into a worldwide deathfest? Will humans be dropping like nine-pins, foaming at the mouth and uttering strange clucking sounds? Will Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, The Birds, come strangely to life, with human populations cowering in fear at the flapping of wings? Will fluffy little sparrows take on the aspect of the pterodactyl? Only a true seer knows the answer to these questions, so Syntagma turned to our resident psychic for guidance.

I’ve written about Jonathan Cainer, an astrologer, a few times before, ever since he was uncannily accurate over the London bombings last year. He’s remarkably frank in his predictions of world events, taking his professional life in his hands every time, it seems to me. What does he have to say about bird ‘flu:

“Bird Flu is not going to be a problem on anywhere near the scale that some folk fear. Nor, though, is it an entirely false alarm.” There will not be a pandemic, he says. Like CJD following the BSE outbreak, a few may die, but not many.

After the chicken incident yesterday, though, I fear we already have a pandemic. A pandemic of panic.