The White Chicken

A non-photographic, irrational contemplation of the meaning of life as we really don’t know it.

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Messages From The Great Beyond

As I was brought up at a strict catholic school, I was always taught that the Giant Marshmallow Man in the Sky (GMMITS) always answered your questions/wishes/ prayers/whatever, but not necessarily in the way you thought He would. To any question you put out to the Cosmos, you would always get a reply in the form of a message, an occurrence or a practical sign if you like, because GMMITS is a practical kinda guy.

Of course I’ve grown out of Catholicism, thank Heavens, but the old habit of watching for messages from the Cosmos still remains, despite my newfound religion of cynicism and cold hard logic. I just can’t help looking. Years of catholic indoctrination and programming don’t just vanish you know. I do try to ignore it, but occasionally there are a series of coincidences so ridiculous that I do start to wonder if there is really Something Out There which is trying to talk to me.

Mathematicians and physicists are adept at finding patterns behind seemingly random events, and research has found that there are many connections between apparently random coincidences befalling mice, men, and other mammals. Of course the beauty of statistics is that you can prove a correlation between anything if you try hard enough, so the jury is still out as to whether there is such a thing as co-incidence, or if instead the universe is all connected and there is something more metaphysical at work.

So where is this pointless ramble going? Well, about two months ago a white chicken suddenly appeared in our garden, seemingly out of nowhere. We often get visiting pheasants, pigeons, moles and the odd hedgehog, but never chickens. I didn’t encourage our new visitor (I didn’t want a new pet) but she came back day after day, suddenly appearing in the drive outside the office. She would stand outside our office window, staring inwards and fixing me with an penetrating, unwavering gaze. It was really creepy.

I started to have nightmares about being chased by mutant killer chickens, and our kids, telepathically sensing a rare chink in the parental armour, exploited this moment of weakness to the full, and started leaving plastic white chickens in my bed, pinning white chicken pictures on my fridge and putting white chicken backdrops on my computer. They called it The Cosmic White Chicken, Harbinger of Doom. Kids can be really mean.

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See what I have to put up with?

Anyway, I refused to crack under all the fowl pressure (sorry) and ignored the sodding thing. It gave up eventually and left. But then the strangest things started happening. White chickens started popping up everywhere, on the news, in magazine adverts, stuffed in our local museum, on a white chicken carousel ride, on the internet whilst browsing real estate and sausages (not together, although living in a sausage town would be kinda cool.)

The final straw came when I dropped into the local cathedral (purely for coffee and bread pudding you understand, which I have to say were awesome…these Christians really know how to lure the punters) and there was a new religious tableau of a giant everlasting Torture Candle (very strange candle covered in barbed wire, in memory of world torture victims apparently) surrounded by…you guessed it…white chickens. They were everywhere, painted on either side of the altar, plus embroidered on tapestries all over the chapel. What did it mean? The Dean was unsurprisingly unavailable to explain White Chicken Religious Art to a middle-aged loon with small kids in tow, so I asked the next best authority, the coffee shop ladies, who were more forthcoming as it was they who had fed coffee and bread pudding to the artist whilst he painted them. They thought that the chickens might be a coat of arms, but the message was supposed to symbolise hope for the future, the triumph of good over evil. Or maybe the guy just had a thing about bread pudding and chickens, who knows?

So I went home boggled, confused and more than a little freaked out. Was this a manifestation of my subconscious or was Something Out There trying to send me a profound message? Were all these coincidences just random cosmic garbage? Had I been drinking too much hallucinogenic cathedral coffee? Or was I myself The Cosmic White Chicken, Harbinger Of Doom? What did it all MEAN???

The very next morning, after three weeks absence, my white chicken came back to visit. She strutted up the drive, and tottering behind her were six little newborn baby chicks, frail, tiny, and wobbling unsteadily after their mother. She stopped outside the office window, puffed out her chest proudly and fixed me with her beady stare. I could swear she winked at me.

I got the message.

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Photograph by Rich of course. Scary Cosmic White Chicken graphics courtesy of oldest son, using Gary's Mod.