February 20, 2008
1. Four up(ish)market and thus too-expensive-for-what-they-are fishfingers, with just-right crunchy breadcrumbs smothering the thick lumps of piping hot white flesh fillets, roughly sliced from the slippery torsos of highly endangered cod. Marinated in chip shop vinegar and smothered in a blizzard of Maldon Sea Salt. Tomato sauce optional.
2. Failing that, the failsafe Sainsbury's Local bargain that is a 95p Admiral's Pie by those microwave maestros that are Young's; all grey meat, clotted mash and fake cheese, lurking craftily beneath a shifting sand dune of sneeze-inducing white pepper.
3. A cheese and onion pasty, but only if it is uncomfortably *ouch* to hold, full of scalding white-hot goo that laughs heartily as it sears off the roof of my mouth, and leaves a vapour trail of flakes across the office.
4. Two perfectly poached eggs, with tender but firm whites and swollen yolks the temperature of molten gold, hacked apart like murder victims to then mush nicely into pliant toast. Stick your Worcestershire Sauce up your arse - I'm on the Tabasco.
5. Remove the Worcestershire Sauce from up your arse, and hand it to me - it's needed to apply raucous splashes of colour and flavour and, frankly, camoflage to the gastronomic catarrh that is tinned Heinz Macaroni Cheese. Yes, it's wrong on each and every level, and yes, it's a disgrace to the very idea of humanity, but lordy, it's fine and dandy when sat under a quilt watching Diagnosis Murder having thrown a sickie due to hangover of heroic proportions.
6. Ice-cold dandelion and burdock pop. Out of those purple and turquoise-ish cans. Complete with necessary subsequent dandelion and burdock burps, too.
7. Lemon sorbet. With a plastic spoon.
8. Brannigan's Roast Beef and Mustard crisps, which were, of course, essentially a raging forest fire in a bag, all heat and tasting of trees, and apparently no longer on sale, but nonetheless the perfect company on a wintry night in a pub-with-log-fire...
9. ...to a slow-poured pint of the finest Black Soup that man can ever be blessed with, more precious and more poignant than his first born, sitting smugly in its glass just knowing its a handsome bastard. Preferably served by an Irish wench with a comely manner. Anywhere but Birkenhead.
10. Indian food*. Chunks of ghee-clogged chicken with gloopy hot sauce, snapped poppadums and those red onion things that always fall off. And lime pickle. And raita. And Cobra beer. And furry wallpaper. And a Bangladeshi in the kitchen.
* At precisely 12.30 today, I'm having an Indian. Which was the whole point of this pointless post. Just so you know.