One of the first things that I discovered when I agreed to do this column is that I have to prepare ahead. So, improbable though it may seem, I am actually writing this only two days after Christmas. What I want to tell you about is my remarkable experience with the Christmas turkey.
Through the unending changes of life in the modern NHS, we struggle to keep the traditions of our GP ward alive. The cast of participants required on Christmas morning includes one doctor to be Father Christmas, one to carve the turkey and as many as possible to turn up with their families, sample some of the amazing supply of strong drink, and wish everybody Merry Christmas.
Now that half us GPs are females the turn to be Father Christmas comes round more often than it did for those who arent, but I havent been asked to do that since I went round the wards kissing all the frail old ladies and giving them my cold - a sort of benevolent euthanasia. No, this year I carved the turkey, my favourite job. I rather pride myself at this and sometimes bring in my own carvers wrapped in a cloth, like a man on the way to a duel. Somehow this year, however, it didnt seem quite so important. This year, to be blunt, the turkey carving was a charade, a hoax, an insult. If it hadnt been our own dear staff dressed up in the fairy outfits which they had made for themselves ("all except for the wings") I would have been tempted to be unseasonably cross. As it was I allowed myself to be aproned, balanced the chefs hat on my head and set to, carving a beautiful pile of meat that, if we couldnt find a hungry animal to eat it, (and where can you find a hungry anything on Christmas Day?) was going to be thrown away.
I'm probably the last person in Britain not to know this, but you cant actually serve turkey that has been cooked on the premises to patients in our Brave New Ward. If you didnt know this I promise I'm not making it up. The turkey that was actually fed to the patients the day before yesterday was cooked in an accredited factory in south Wales and brought all the way here in a freezer lorry to be heated up in a special trolley on the ward. Neither Sister nor any of her staff were qualified to supervise this procedure and a man had to come from somewhere or other to measure the temperature with a probe before giving them the go ahead. Furthermore, if you can take more, once the food had cooled it could not be reheated - perhaps for someone who had missed the main meal time for some good reason, and they would have to go hungry. Or subsist, I suppose, on Cadburys Roses and Scotch, both of which were plentiful and from which we still remain unaccountably unprotected by officialdom.
As I carved my mock turkey I could hardly fail to notice that it was cooked, with a touch of humour of which I thoroughly approved, to the point of almost complete disintegration. A mere fraction of its original size, it hung from its bones, and I didn't have so much to carve it as give it a nudge or two and it fell apart with a sigh. Any Salmonella that had survived the inferno that turkey had obviously been through would have been justified in claiming the odd mere human as a prize.
Oh well, its progress I suppose. The bad old days when people were dying like flies after eating Christmas turkeys that were barely comatose are gone and a good thing too. No more the roads to hospitals choked with undertakers vans on Christmas evening. It just seems a shame that a generation will grow up thinking that cooking turkeys is something that has to be done in a factory according to rules. Oh well, gives us something to ponder in our hearts until next year. Whats the betting theyll have done something about the Cadburys Roses and the Scotch by then?
James Willis, January 1996