MUSICIAN Kieran White had been scratching a decent living teaching piano and playing in jazz bands in venues across York. But he felt all cooped up. He longed to spread his wings and fly the nest.

That explains why, if you bump into the York University music graduate this time next week, he will be dressed like this. Yes. As a chicken.

Why? "Ever since I first left the egg I wanted to be a chicken," he confides to Turpin over a cup of tea.

In fact, it is a wheeze to promote the premium rate phone line Jokes'n'Stuff. This is an automated service pranksters can dial to wind up their mates.

But could Kieran just hand out leaflets like a normal person? Clearly not...

"I thought, wouldn't it be a wheeze if I dressed like a chicken? It would certainly make leafleting a little bit more memorable."

Kieran asked around and found "a bespoke chicken tailor in Leeds". The £100 rooster suit is an investment, he says, as he expects to earn more than just chicken feed.

Kieran (who hails from Barking - no comment) is now in training, building up his pecks.

He calls his alter eggo Charlie Cluck. And the ivory tickler is planning a jazz gig dressed as the funky chicken at the Fulford Arms on Wednesday (chicks go free).

So when you see an oversized hen handing out leaflets in York city centre next week, don't tell him to get stuffed or ask him why he crossed the road. Just admire his pluck.

u A YOUNG scamster sloped into York's Fulford Road nick the other day and asked for a police form to prove to his insurance company he had duly reported the theft of his mobile phone. But the would-be fraudster dropped the form in a flash when the mobile phone in his pocket started to ring. Bad form old boy, bad form!

u VALE of York Tory MP, former MEP and lawyer Anne McIntosh showed her legal expertise during a debate on the EU sugar regime.

She was calling for changes to a trade policy which could hit the UK sugar industry.

"I gather that the use of article 133 is the reason why the European Parliament could not effectively be involved in the procedure," she said.

Mid-Worcestershire Conservative MP Peter Luff was sitting behind her during the Commons debate.

"You're such an anorak," he whispered.

She retorted to the cheeky Tory: "I'm not an anorak, I'm a McIntosh."

uLET'S get philosophical for a moment with these challenging thoughts...

He who laughs last thinks slowest.

Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted, then used against you.

Despite the cost of living, have you noticed how it remains so popular?

It is said that if you line up all the cars in the world end to end, someone will be stupid enough to try and overtake them.

You can't have everything - where would you put it?

I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it.

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

u SPEAKING of which, Dianne Fielding of Halifax made me laugh with her letter to a national heavy this week. She was travelling on a Manchester-York train when she heard the following announcement: "This train will call at Garforth, East Garforth, Micklefield and Ulleskelf, due to arrive in York... whenever."

u OSCAR Wilde died last Thursday... 100 years ago.

But his awesome wit lives on. So here's my Christmas present to two lucky lovers of humour. Thanks to publishers Metro Books, I have hard-back copies of Oscar Wilde, A Life In Quotes by Barry Day to win. But only two, I'm afraid.

Just out at £12.99, the book features many of Wilde's famous lines and epigrams from his plays, poems and scintillating conversations - all linked to events in the playwright's turbulent, triumphant life.

After serving a hard labour sentence in Reading Gaol following ruinous legal battles he went into self-imposed exile in Paris as Sebastian Melmoth.

Skint and shunned by friends in England his humour, if not his writing, was still as sharp as ever, as A Life In Quotes ably sets out.

He once told his sister-in-law when facing by steep medical bills for treatment to the ear infection that eventually killed him in Paris: "Ah, well, then, I suppose I shall have to die beyond my means."

Timeless and priceless, Oscar!

For a chance to win one of the books just tell me in which city did Oscar Wilde die?

Send your entry with your name and address and daytime telephone number on a postcard to Dick Turpin, Oscar Competition, PO Box 35, 76-86 Walmgate, York YO1 9YN by next Thursday.

Charlie Cluck's mega hits

u Bantam of the Opera

u Heninem's Greatest Hits

u Lay Lady Lay

u Hen Will I See You Again

u I Should Be So Clucky

u Nice Eggs Shame About Her Face

u Squawk On The Wild Side

u Hennyone Who Had A Heart

u I'm Cluck On You

u Funky Chicken