Turkey supper cancelled? Not in my house...

It was inevitable, it was meant to happen, no looking back we knew we were going to be infected…yes H5N1 or bird flu as it is commonly known has hit the Greatest British shores.

I was only yesterday taking out my Turkey from the freezer...no I am not kidding. I took it out on Friday night to defrost for a bit of Turkey get together with the family on Sunday…not just any Turkey this one is born and bred in Norfolk…cause it says so on the package…Norfolk Turkey from Bernard Matthews…Bootiful…

I could not have planned it myself better, I needed to empty my second freezer for a clean out and there was “Big Bird” staring at me saying me, please, me, cook me and I decided what the heck…I don’t need Easter or Christmas or even Thanksgiving to roast a Turkey so I called the daughter and her bird loving boyfriend, asked them to come around on Sunday for a roast…what’s for dinner said the daughter? Turkey…yum she answered, with stuffing and all the trimmings…of course was my response…

Now I wake up in the morning, only to find BBC helicopters almost crashing into Sky News helicopters on the news, and my “Bernard the Turkey” is defrosted, yes it was frozen why else would I take it out of the freezer to clean it out? I have a daughter, who never looks at the news, unless it is included in a television sitcom, she asks if the Turkey is sick?

Faced with the question and not wanting to frighten my daughter to become a vegetarian living on pine nuts for the rest of her life I said, sick is not the right word…it is dead, was my prompt answer.

But does it have bird flu?

Well I answered, hard to tell but most likely yes, it went into the freezer without clothing or feathers just a small sheet of plastic for protection and since it is pretty cold in that particular freezer flu could be quite possible…

Dad…did it look sick? Well you could say so...it has no head and the neck, heart and some other small bits are shoved up its arse, in a plastic bag, so you could say that it looked sick…

That is it…We will not eat the Turkey, was the reply…

Now here I am cooking a fancy lunch of Turkey and all the trimmings and just because some 150,000 Turkeys was met with a premature death in Suffolk (mine is from Norfolk) doesn’t mean that you are going to get sick or that my bird is infected…I bought it well before Christmas as I did not know how many people we were having for Christmas dinner, so the likelihood is that the bird snuffed it from 240 volts rather than some strain of Avian Flu, the Asian version…

But here we are miles away from the infected area and I have to defend MY Turkey from investigation…

Well I am going to cook it, eat it and if necessary force feed the family with it for three days, as tradition is, and then I am going to go out and see the price drop and buy some more…