11 a.m. There is a knock at the door!!!
It is Big A. He is going away for a long weekend and would like me to look after his chicken. I am pleased to look after his chicken. It is no trouble, as he just lives round the corner, and as chickens go, his is no trouble. I know where the chicken food is kept, but he goes through it again, and I promise to treat the chicken well. To be honest, it is quite nice. Once I was a newcomer to chickens, fumbling around with my ‘keeping chickens for beginners’ book. Now I am the go-to man for looking after peoples’ chickens whilst they go off on long weekends. I bid my friend goodbye and wish him a pleasant break.
2 p.m. The chicken dies.
That’s it, Jonny. No babysitting for you…
Also, *this* is how you decide to tell him? What’s wrong with picking up the phone, for Christ’s sake?
That was quick work. I’d be impressed, were I not rather horrified. Was the unfortunate fowl a rival for your affections with your own chickens and they spiked its chicken food?
Booooo it went and died deliberately, just to spite me.
Roast chicken, new pots and veg??!
Please tell me that hi-jinks ensued when you replaced it with an identical looking chicken, but it turned out that the reason that the replacement chicken wasn’t laying any eggs was because it was male, so when Big A came back you had to keep sneaking round and putting shop-bought eggs into the coop under cover of darkness, which works for a bit till he has a boiled egg one morning and he then proclaims his chicken as a miracle worker as it lays eggs with dates stamped on them, and he gets to go on The One Show with it, but an expert points out that the chicken is male, which is like a double miracle, what with it laying eggs, and then he starts up a travelling miracle chicken act, and you have to follow him around the world sneaking eggs into the coop, and then Big A gets so rich he goes away for another long weekend and asks you to look after the chicken, and you really really want to kill this chicken by now, and you have this terrible fight, but the thing won’t die, and you get caught and publicly shamed as the man who tried to kill the miracle chicken, and you get sent to prison, but now no one is sneaking the eggs into the coop, so the miracle chicken stops laying them, and Big A, who has given up his job to travel the world with the chicken now has no income, and he’s going to feed the chicken to his starving children, so you have to break out of prison and save the chicken, because every day in prison you’ve been thinking about this chicken and realise that you love it, so you just make it back to Big A’s in time with some eggs you picked up from the shop, and you explain everything and all have a big omelette. The End.
Honestly – don’t you just hate it when that happens?