MOVING HOUSE RANKS as one of life's great traumas, alongside getting a new job, getting married the first time and getting lost on the one-way traffic system in Basingstoke, England. The prospect of spending the rest of my days amid tons of cat food on the hoof merely adds to the piquancy of the occasion.

My wife Elizabeth and I, plus cats Currant Bun, Teddy and Ali Magraw, are about to take leave of big city life - and quite possibly our senses - and head for the sticks. In a few short weeks, it's goodbye London, hello Croughton (off at Exit 10 of the M40 motorway, then hang a sharp left at the third rabbit hutch).

What we are fleeing is plain enough - a metropolitan morass where people spend on rent what those in saner climes spend on diamond necklaces, where public transport is a training ground for sardine packers, where driving techniques combine the artistry of fairground dodgems with ancient eastern traditions of kamikaze.

(That being said, if you must live in a capital city, London remains the best in the world. Which doesn't say a lot for the rest.)

The countryside we are fleeing to is quite likely far more salubrious but rather less certain. For sure, there are the drinks and fish and chips and quiz nights down at the Blackbird Inn, and a log fire awaiting our return to our cottage, and a walk once every three or four months through the mud, barbed-wire fences and brambles.

My concern with this bucolic dreamland is the creatures that inhabit it and alongside which I am expected to co-exist - peacefully, my wife warns me, or else. And that means learning to live with ambulatory pre-canned cat food, raw material for the Kentucky Colonel, and other things that oink and squawk and screech in the night.

For openers there are horses. Now it's a fact that horses and I do not like each other. Horses are at their best in paintings or in those little cans that friends keep bringing back from Belgium and France and that I keep feeding to Ali Magraw, Teddy and Currant Bun.

My distrust of this four-legged fiend stems from the day when my mother took me to a fairground in Huntsville, Alabama, and had me strapped atop a pony for a walk around a circular track, led by some chap whose job was to hold onto those rein thingies that are supposed to control the blasted creature.

His abject failure in this task was probably aided and abetted by my having seen one too many Gene Autry movies at Huntsville's Lyric and Grand theaters that afternoon. I gave the animal a swift kick in the ribs, whereupon it took off like some demented banshee. The saddle slipped and I spent the rest of the circuit dangling and staring at a pony navel as I swung back and forth, like a pendulum with an irksome scream.

A few years later, my Uncle Kenneth seems to have interpreted my screech at the mere mention of the word "horse" as a pre-pubescent whoop of joy at the prospect of a career as an equestrian and gave me one for a birthday present. This particular animal went by the name of Man-O-Man.

Man-O-Man brought to our relationship the singular ability to treat me as the eponymous character in an H.G. Wells novel, "The Invisible Man." He totally ignored anything and everything I did. He would stop at will to munch on grass, trapping my fingers on that pointy bit of the saddle until they started turning green.

As far as controlling this horse was concerned, I might as well have issued orders in Swahili as spoken in northwest Scotland. Man-O-Man paid zilch attention to the reins, and his favorite course took him beneath any tree whose branches were just high enough to scrape me off the saddle and onto the ground via his rump.

I can only hope that Man-O-Man ended his days on the sticky side of postage stamps. My feelings on the subject of things equine haven't stopped neighbors in the village from asking how soon I intend to join in the local sport of horseback riding. As soon, I reply, as I get back from ice-skating in Hell.

Even as I busily fend off the undesired attentions of the horsy set, Elizabeth comes up with another plum. When we move into the cottage full time, she wants to get in a supply of chickens. Live ones that lay eggs, and also cackle and scratch and in general behave as if they are on a lifetime supply of Ex-Lax.

This notion was germinated during our vacation to Wales a few days ago, when she discovered that our hosts at the Llanddignog bed and breakfast, Ken and Gloria, had 10 chickens. They also had, I reminded my dear wife, six acres of land. Our back garden at the cottage, I add, is just about big enough for a spit-and-spittoon contest, provided the bystanders wear raincoats.

My wife gave me just about the same sort of look I got from old Man-O-Man. Suitably equipped with a handbook, "Hens in Your Garden," provided by B&B host Ken, Elizabeth is planning a raid on England's Vale of Evesham, evidently some sort of magnet for iron-bound poultryites.

I have sought to give her the benefit of my own experiences of life, including the day when my father brought home a thousand baby chicks and some sort of whacko dream about endless supplies of eggs and drumsticks and white meat sandwiches. This, mind you, to a house that was comfortably inside the city limits of Knoxville, Tennessee.

Within two days, about 950 of the wretched things had turned their scrawny legs to the skies and gone off to chick Valhalla. When, four months later, we were down to 26, Dad murdered one and served it up at dinner, which he ate alone. The other 25 had all become pets - with names. Eating one would be like dining on your Labrador.

The only thing Elizabeth seems to have learned from this parable is that chickens should have names. She's already named two of the three she intends to buy - Susan and Janet. She says I can pick a name for the third.

So if you happen to be passing through Croughton, England, you are welcome to drop by Chard Cottage and meet the Webbs - Elizabeth and Al, and Ali Magraw, Teddy and Currant Bun, and Susan and Janet. And my own chicken. She's called Spot.

Thought for the Week: If you think you're a person of some influence, try ordering someone else's dog around.

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