Cookson and Kebabs

Yesterday afternoon, feeling a little lethargic and wanting nothing more than to curl up on the sofa with a good movie, I did just that. Curl up on the sofa, that is. The good movie was nowhere to be found so I stupidly, stupidly, started watching a TV adaptation of Catherine Cookson’s ‘The Man Who Cried.’ I don’t even like Catherine Cookson so I have no idea what possessed me to sit there for THREE hours and watch it. Actually an hour and a half in I was going to change channels but argued with myself that it would be a complete waste of 90 minutes if I didn’t see it through to the end. (I do that with books, too. Once I start one, I have to finish it.)

I’ve just read the synopsis for the book, which begins:

“There are men who can at times be stirred by the power and conflict of their own emotions to the point of shedding tears.”

Wow. Really? Now that’s a revelation!

Yeah, he cried at the end and the titles rolled. What a big steaming, three hour pile of clap-trap.

Expecting one thing and getting something completely different is disappointing, so I was still wallowing in self-pity when Rob sent me a text message from the pub which read: “do you want a kebab when I come home?”

For the non Brits reading this, I’ll quickly explain that an afternoon or evening on the beer is not complete without a stagger into the kebab shop and an attempt to get the unidentifiable pile of gloop from container to mouth, all the while mmming and ahhing about how wonderful it tastes when in fact it tastes bloody awful.

So I replied: “No thanks.”

A couple of hours later though, I was feeling a little bit peckish and so changed my mind. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stomach the reconstituted slithers of elephant’s foot which they are somehow permitted to call meat, so I asked Rob for a vegetable kebab. For the next hour I began to build up an appetite – imagining char-grilled peppers, tomatoes and mushrooms on a skewer, perhaps with a little salad and a warm pitta bread. I was almost on the verge of excitement when he returned.

“I’m not sure which one’s yours,” he said, slightly slurring and handing me a container. I opened it up, looked at it and said “It’s definitely not this one.” Rob peered into it. “Yep, that one’s yours,” he told me and started tucking into his. I looked again, confused, and shoved my fork into a 4 inch thick mound of gunk, rooting around for my vegetables. Eventually I came across a lump. It looked like nothing I had ever seen before and as there was no way the name of this vegetable was going to jump out and bite me, I hesitantly decided to suck off some of the sauce. Bad move. Garlic and chilli sauce. Very, very hot chilli sauce. I HATE chilli sauce. And there was enough of it to plaster the ceiling with. I sighed, continuing to search for lumps which were sauce free. When I had a very small pile of them in the corner of the dish, I popped one into my mouth. The substance resembled balls of squished up cold porridge. “What is this stuff?” I asked him, spitting it back out. “Well, they didn’t do vegetable kebabs,” he said, smiling triumphantly, “so it’s a chopped up vege-burger.”

WTF? Not only was it a chopped up vege-burger, but it was – I’m convinced - a chopped up raw vege-burger.

So now I was scooping all the un-cooked burger bits in to the lid of the container - along with the garlic and chilli sauce - in a frantic search for some salad, and that’s when I came across about 2lbs of raw onion which is about my third least favourite food in the world (after chilli sauce and raw vege-burger). I threw 7 fistfuls of onion into the lid and saw what I was left with. A solitary pitta bread. Which looked exactly like bread would if you soaked it in milk for three weeks.

Call me ungrateful, but I wrapped it all up again in the sauce-smothered paper and threw it in the bin. Rob, bless him, offered to share his with me, so I grabbed a very small tea-plate.

I’d just taken ten minutes managing to convince myself that the chunk of meat on my fork was actually chicken and I was just about to put it into my mouth, when I looked up at the telly. And there I saw a guy in the middle of the jungle - machete in hand - dismembering a monkey for his supper.

For some reason I went to bed on an empty stomach.
Disappointed.
Hungry.
And just a little bit queasy.