Ah, the nostalgia.

Christmas is coming....  Went out at the weekend to buy a turkey crown for Christmas Day.  And that started me thinking - we are now so used to being able to pick up an oven-ready chicken or turkey at any time of year, that it's hard to realise that it's not that long ago that chicken (turkey was almost unheard of then) was just a once or twice a year treat.  And when you bought a chicken, that's what you got - head, feet, feathers, the lot.  I can see my Gran now, sitting on a chair in the kitchen surrounded by newspaper on the floor, plucking a chicken laid across her lap.  Then when you'd got rid of all the main feathers, you would screw up bits of newspaper into spills, which you would light and then burn off all the remaining "pin feathers".  Quite a performance, so perhaps not surprising that you only had a chicken at Christmas, and maybe Easter.  Rabbit was a more common meal, but that wasn't easy to deal with either - you'd hang it up on the back of the door by its feet, cut round the legs and yank the skin down to peel it off - hence the expression (round here anyway) of "skin a rabbit" when you're pulling a tight jumper off a child.  How things have changed.