The hens have stopped laying

Late September and  inexplicably all the hens have stopped laying. From 5 or 6 eggs a day we now have none. Nothing much has changed - we did go away for a few days but they were looked after by our new neighbour; the weather has been awful but then it has been dreadful all year; some of them are looking bedraggled and are obviously being bullied but then that has been happening for some time. Whenever production has reduced in the past we have altered their feed to include only layer pellets with neither corn nor treats and so this has become the new regime - we will just have to wait and see.
More bad news came with the demise of Demi - the cat belonging to some near friends, who was killed on our road - a busy noisy main route which I try to ignore if I can but which often causes me to remember that there are some things I can do something about and other things that I am completely powerless over.
As this seems to be a post with a rather negative tone then I will continue with the disappointment I have been experiencing with the yarn I recently purchased. I had thought that I wanted cotton yarn and that it would be fun to knit with and would look good. I was wrong. I dislike knitting with it, it shows every slight imperfection and I am not happy with it - especially as I bought in volume and now have an awful lot of unsatisfactory ( to me) yarn. The moderne baby blanket I started will probably not be finished; the log cabin probably will be finished but it will not be something I really want to keep or show to people; the baby cardigans are alright but not what I expected. I must try to think of some other things to use the yarn for.
Nowadays it is rare for me to have negative days and, if things do seem bad, I know what I have to do. To take my mind off things not going well today I decided to bake an apple cake, picking up a few windfalls and to make a ratatouille with some garden courgettes ( needless to say I forgot about that and it burnt! - it would do today) I have also been knitting using some beautiful yarn from the stash - but that is not turning out as well as I had hoped - oh dear!
I started to laugh to myself as I just wrote the last paragraph. There was a time when all the above would have been a disaster but there is usually a solution for everything and one will appear at the right time. I have lit a fire and a log is burning brightly, it is not raining and a friend is coming round for a cup of tea . Everything will be alright in the end and it it is not alright it is not the end.