Just a small note on modern life.

Every year for the last two and a half decades, about two days before Christmas, I have been dispatched to pick up the turkey from wherever we have ordered it. Suppliers seem to come and go, so I’m never quite sure where to get the Christmas centrepiece. I prefer not to do the obvious thing, and get it from the supermarket: the tales of poor husbandry and weak/broken bones in the short-lived animals don’t appeal to me, even though the prices are cheap.

A couple of months ago, we were driving up the A251 towards Faversham. We passed a sign just saying “Molash Turkeys”. There was no address or phone number, just the logos for Facebook and Twitter. I was in the passenger seat, so I dialled up Twitter on my phone and searched for Molash Turkeys. There was a Twitter account, but no tweets: just a link to their website. 

The long and the short of it is that we ordered our turkey via Molash Turkeys website, and collected it from the farm this morning. The farm is down a tiny, muddy road out on the North Downs, but driving directions from Google maps, spoken by my wife's phone, got us there very easily.

Turkeys are just a small side-business of a large farm on the North Downs, where they rear about 400 birds under humane conditions, and give them longer to develop than standard supermarket turkeys. They were doing a brisk trade this morning, and seem to have sold every bird they had reared. I’ll update** this post once we’ve tasted the turkey to see whether it is a success - it certainly looks great.

But the point I want to make is about one small aspect of the way we currently live. A sign on a  country road that we flashed past gave us all the information we needed. No address or phone number - you can’t take them in while driving - just a couple of instantly-familiar logos. Even then, it is not Twitter that tells you about the farm or its products - Twitter is just a site for a link. 

I know that this comes as no surprise to anyone in the current age, but it represents an extraordinary change in how we all do business and shopping. Just two words and a couple of logos are enough. That and a mobile phone. 

**UPDATE: 27 Dec 2017

Yes - it was delicious!