Guilty pleasures

In yesterdays post  ( liar liar pants on fire)  I  let slip that in fact it was me who left my brothers new bike in the road, only for it to be crushed by the bin lorry ( he took the news quite well when he read it last night 50 odd years later) . So in the light of new beginnings and relief that no longer will I have sleepless nights thinking about how I wronged him, we move onwards in the spirit of honesty being the best policy

I remember reading in one of the Sunday magazines about a chef ( cant remember who,  but very well known) After serving amazing foodie food all day he said when he went home the one thing he loved more than anything else  was a fishfinger sandwich with salad cream on white sliced bread. If hungover ( obviously a rare and unusual state of affairs) my food of choice is tinned grapefruit and those miniature Scotch eggs with a dollop of Hellmans. And there there is my friend the staunch strict healthy eater who once a year escapes without her children  to McDonalds where she wolfs down a big Mac in the car park ( hopefully) without anyone seeing her. I know this because I happened once to be in the same car park at the same time (not also partaking it has to be said, she said smugly). 

And then there are the  foods of the you will never eat again as long as you live variety. I had a friend who had a summer job in a Walkers crisp factory. Imagine the smell of cheese and onion crisps then multiply it, putting it in enormous cauldrons full of the sickly feet smelling flavouring. From that day onwards he never ate another crisp. He then went on to work in a place where they made sandwiches for British rail. Again, such a sandwich has not passed through his lips since ( though frankly thats not difficult to imagine). Someone else in the same year at college worked in the Bowyers sausage factory. He worked alongside an old man whose nickname was Fingers. Yes, you guessed it, he had none, lost them in the mincer. Near where we work there is a large Covent Garden soup unit. Apparantly somebody fell in and drowned in a large vat of their chicken soup though I’m not sure if this is really true. 

Our boarding school was next to Harris’s sausage factory ,a large Victorian dungeon of a place full of shouting and clanging. You could hear the pigs squealing as we walked through the town to church. Every now and then a brave pig would make a run for it. I remember a particularly horrible episode when one managed to escape and get on to our games pitch and was chased by a pair of men who looked just like the baddies from 101 Dalmatians with sticks with nails in the end which they whacked it with and made its head bleed, as we all stood and watched in horror. As is the way of these places, they had a glue factory nearby where they boiled up all the bones to make glue and Haribos. The smell was foul, pervading every crevice of the town  and must surely have affected the local house prices. 

Luckily for the pig population and the ears of the schoolgirls on their way to church Harris’s is no longer there and is now a shopping mall.