And lo! he looked on his works and he said, 'Bootiful'
'And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Bernard, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
"And he did come from the place that is called Norfolk. And he looked on his works, and he quoth: 'Bootiful!' And by these tokens shall ye know him."
It's the bathos that really grates. If – as I cheerfully anticipate – the last rags of human civilisation are shredded by a global bird flu pandemic, and what survivors still stalk the earth do so in a blighted landscape resembling a Cormac McCarthy novel, isn't it just a bit gloomy to think that the epicentre of the disaster could turn out to be a Bernard Matthews turkey farm in Suffolk?
The dramatic arc, nevertheless, has something to it. Bernard has been there, lurking in the background, since our school days. "Bootiful," he chortled from our television screens as we washed our post-school packets of cheese-and-onion down with life-giving draughts of Um Bongo. A figure of glowing benignity, he was often photographed cradling a happy-looking turkey in his arms: father, protector, nurturer. Many of us, in the run-up to Christmas, may even have confused him with Santa Claus.
What, we wondered with excitement, was the magical process of "butter-basting"? How did he think up Golden Drummers? And then top them with Mini Golden Drummers? The Mini Kiev, the breaded escalope, the marvellous and paradoxical Turkey Ham? Into how many multifarious and splendid forms were his magical machines able to transform the simple gobbler?
He has suffered his setbacks, too. The mortification of the two wayward employees caught playing baseball with live turkeys and a length of piping. The Calvary of the Turkey Twizzler debate. And yet, he abideth. And – except when someone sneaks a camera into one of his barns – he worketh in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.
Now (by sheer misfortune) H5N1 has chosen one of his farms as a staging post for its invasion of the British isles. Bad luck on Bernard. Bad luck on the turkeys. Bad luck, possibly, on the rest of us. We deserve disaster with dignity.
When Oppenheimer realised what he was on to with the atom bomb, he is said to have declared: "Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." "Bootiful!" doesn't have the same ring to it.
By Sam Leith -
www.telegraph.co.uk 
H5N1... It's 'Bootiful!' 
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