Assisted tits?
Being a London boy with my London ways, I’ve had limited experience of country life. The occasional weekend cottage in North Wales and four-in-a-bed caravanning holidays in the middle of nowhere don’t really count. To be sure, on primary school trips to Swanage in Dorset and Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, I endured the obligatory excursion to real life jobbing farms to sniff the shitty whiff, pet the ponies and frighten the sheep. I do remember thinking ‘Sunday roast, mint sauce with all the trimmings, yummy’. The scale of modern-day industrial farming was driven home when I watched conveyor belt cows being drained by an enormous robotic milking machine. No wonder Daisy always looked startled.
Until we set foot on Anatolian soil, I’d never seen a live chicken in the flesh, so to speak. My chickens came hung, drawn and often quartered. Suddenly, clutches of clucking chickens were everywhere I looked, even in the heart of Bodrum. The harems of hens were invariably corralled by a loud and bad-tempered rooster complete with dandy plumage and a cock of the coop demeanour (a bit like the waiters). I remember thinking that British chickens must be smaller than their Turkish cousins. Perhaps Turkish fowl live longer and grow larger. Perhaps they’re fed on extra-strength growth hormones. Whatever the reason, Turkish chicken breasts were Amazonian by comparison, the Katie Price of the poultry world.
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