Turkey

So, I just made a brief trip to the supermarket to buy the Christmas Turkey. We ( well, hubster and brother ) are cooking it this year, as I was beginning to feel a little nervous that we wouldn't get one ..... all it would take was a freak blizzard and all the trucks could get stuck, you laugh, but it could happen, and I wasn't being the person responsible for a turkeyless Christmas, heck no.


I step inside the hooooge supermarket, and ask at the customer service desk if the fresh Turkeys were in, as soon as the words left my lips, I knew I was in for a less than straightforward answer.....the guy looked at me blankly, then kind of murmured... ' erm, i'm not sure, but, er, well I think it will be sometime this week' I managed to hold the smile from my face, or at least make it look like a 'thankyou for helping me' smile, not a ' REALLY ? well i never expected that the turkey's would be sold the week running up to Christmas' smile. He then turned to the lady next to him, who was asked the turkey related question... she paused, looked up a bit, in a thoughtful kind of way and said, very seriously, ' I think it will be sometime this week' .......Oh, i am glad I was on my own, or laughter would surely have followed. So I (very politely) said I would just go and have a look, and thanked them for their 'help'.


When I arrived at the chilly isle full of vacuum packed meat, sure enough, there were a few turkeys lurking in the bottom of the chiller. Not being able to find quite the weight I wanted, I asked another unsuspecting shop assistant if he could look for the size I was after in the store cupboard thingy out the back. He very kindly obliged and after a few minutes returned with exactly the same size that was already there, so I said I would just have a look and decide what size to get, just as I thought he had walked off, he proceeded to tell me that, in the store cupboard there were turkeys 'this small' - hands cupped into a small size, and how it was really cruel to kill a baby turkey. I was unsure weather to break the news that killing a baby turkey wasn't really any more cruel than killing a big turkey, when he said ' the little ones have got so much more to live for, the older ones don't mind cos they have had their life'.................... where to start.....?! 'um, well, i'm not sure if these turkeys really have a good life at all, they were probably squashed in a dark barn with lots of other turkeys anyway.' ....... he looked a bit perplexed and said, 'oh, i thought it was just chickens which got treated like that', and so we carried on, having a very lovely chat about the cruelty to animals thing. 
After finally selecting my turkey, which has to be said, is a lot bigger than we need, but I felt I had to buy one and couldn't bear going to another supermarket tomorrow to go through the same process all over again, I dragged it to the checkout, at which point the lady said to me '£40 for a turkey, that's well expensive' !  Not entirely sure their manager would be too pleased with such comments, but all in all, the staff were very friendly, and most definitely amusing.
So despite the fact that our bird hasn't lived a 'happy running around outside kind of life', I wouldn't have had quite such a fun time trying to buy it at the farm shop now would I ....?


Now to fit it in the fridge.......