Along Came A Chicken

When I was on holiday in Mexico I watched a man put a chicken into a trance. Hypnotised the little bugger right there in front of me. What was absolutely amazing was his command of another being, with a confidence lacking even in stage-hypnotists he just firmly held the chicken's head down against the ground and whilst it squalked and clawed and tried to get free he just started drawing a line in front of it in the dirt with his free hand with a stick.

Backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards.

Starting at the beak and going straight outward in front of the chicken.

Beak and out. Out and beak again.

You'll know when it is hypnotised because the chicken goes silent and just stares at the line.

This crazy Mexican reckoned it would stay there for anything up to half an hour. I didn't doubt his integrity but to be honest I wasn't going to stick around and watch a chicken frozen in space and time for half an hour.

Well I was telling this to a mate of mine and he decides that this is a money maker.

"People out there will pay for owt," he says.

I asked him what he had in mind with a mouth full of peanuts and trepidation.

"The internet," he discloses. "All them perverts. That mucky shit doesn't just download itself you know. Well, it can but that's another story."

So he buys a chicken, his wife gets busy making a gold lame bikini because he convinced her of the money making potential.

He tells me, "It's strictly glamour shots y'understand. Nowt too mucky. I couldn't stomach it and besides the wife would kill me."

"So there'll be no breasts then?" I enquire. "I do like a good chicken breast."

There was an update a few days ago; the initial success he had experienced in hypnotising the beast had been marred slightly by the fact that his wife had been reaching around to secure the bikini top and the chicken had woken itself from the trance and, seemingly unaware that it was a chicken and not a blackbird, panicked and pecked out her eye. Now he's sleeping on the sofa.

"But there is an upside," he tells me. "I think she'll forgive me when she sees what I'm cooking for Sunday dinner."

"Perhaps," I replied, handing him the eye-patch I had fashioned for her. "Or perhaps not."