Thought for the day

Have been haunted about the story of Francis Bacon (below) and his death by chicken (right). According to popular history (ie probably made up, at least in part), the essayist and inventor of modern science got out of his carriage in Highgate one winter evening in 1626. To prove a point about his theory of refrigeration, he bought a chicken and encased it in snow. This all happened in the little Highgate Pond Square.

To cut a short story shorter, the chicken still rotted, but Bacon caught a chill and died soon after. Bizarrely, it is the chicken that is said to haunt the square to this day.

Seems an odd sort of celestial justice to me, though. I'm presuming that the chicken was dead when Bacon bought it - I find it hard to imagine even this most rigorous scientist dispatching (and presumably plucking and eviscerating) the bird on a whim. The bird was sitting in Ye Olde Poulterers waiting for some Early Modern Londoner's pot, anyway. The point being, what is this chicken-phantom's problem?

Or rather, why did this become a ghost story? I think it relates backwards - to a time less than half a century earlier when John Dee had been seen as a black magician for his scientific experiments, his animals his familiars. But it also looks forward to the post-enlightenment modern era, when any involvement by science in the 'way things are' is considered to be meddling with the natural order of things. And sometimes is.

The moral of this? It's either to watch out for ghostly turkey twizzlers amassing around the country, Day of the Dead-style, or make sure you wrap up warm this winter.