Toss Cheese

I have a new cookbook in my collection. It advocates that we sane and healthy people Make a Meal of Cheese.

According to the book, however, only hard British cheeses can be used to make a meal, and despite a chirpy guide to regional hard cheeses (Wensleydale, Cheshire etc), all the recipes use only four to 8 ounces of grated or cubed cheddar. That's all the recipes. ALL of them. Including the recipes for apple crumble, lemon tart and curry.

Yes, cheese curry exists: mattar paneer is delicious, rich and mild good stuff, one of the very few dishes that can convince me (momentarily) that vegetarianism is bearable. Saag paneer, paneer tikka... cheese curry works if the cheese is curry-appropriate and the sauce / preparation is decent. Cheese curry will NOT work if the cheese is cubed cheddar, lying like heavy rubber dice in curry powder soup. Putting sultanas in the mix is just insulting. The 1973 Cheese Information Service, Thames Ditton Surrey: how dare you? Really, really HOW DARE YOU? Cheddar, curry powder AND sultanas... it's a recipe that cynically assumes no one made it out of the 1960s with a braincell or tastebud intact. It's just... rude. As is this:

After scrutinising the recipe many, many incredulous times, I cannot see how or why this is 'toss'. There is no tossing involved. Cheddar, it seems, is a gateway to bad culinary behaviour, and the 1973 Cheese Information Service was perhaps an unwitting warning system of the level of craziness you could reach if you did indeed try to Make a Meal of Cheese. For example: with too much cheese in your diet, you could be led to believe that, honestly, using bananas instead of leeks is an excellent idea.


Too much cheese too close to bedtime can give you nightmares. Too much cheese too often can obviously turn your life into a living nightmare. 1973 Cheese Information Service: thank you for the valuable (and illustrated) lesson in having too much of a good thing and ruining it for everyone.

16.04.12 UPDATE This is why blogging is worth it: until I posted this, I didn't know the The Vintage Cookbook Trials existed. Here, the team at The Vintage Cookbook Trials has dared to MAKE DISHES FROM THIS BOOK and eat them. See the horrors brought to life. And pray for their souls.

Grief Cake for Bleak Kids

Parents of young Goths always struggle to find appropriate birthday cakes for their kids. It's an annual dilemma: you want to celebrate the passing of another year and the onset of maturity in your offspring. As responsible and loving parents, it would be nice to mark the passing of childhood, to look proudly into the eyes of the little tot you taught to walk, talk and maybe ride a bike and see an adult, ready to make their mark in the grown-up world.

This may be hard when the little tot has become a pre-teen beanstalk attempting to eat Cheez Stringz while wearing black lipstick. It is difficult to embrace adulthood with a 13 year old who insists on wearing a squeaky faux-leather floor length trench coat bought with a slightly more experienced Goth friend in Camden Market. How can parents realistically organise a birthday party for their child who now doesn't believe in birthdays because they have become a Vampire of the Endless Ones (on Fridays after school and most of Saturday and Sunday except when visiting Grandma)?

But the solution is here: the Grief Cake for Bleak Kids!


From the brilliant Good Housekeeping's Picture Cookery book which has featured many times before, this cake is the solution to placating the Goth child who still expects a birthday cake despite rejecting sunlight, colours and generally being upbeat .

The uneven layers and tar-like topping of the cake are depressing, and suitable for any amateur young Goth. So sad, so poorly executed, it's a stack of baked tears streaked with deathbed poetry.

The little figures on top signify the emptiness of being, the formlessness of human misery. We think we are all individuals with our own unique, bleak lives to struggle through, but really, we are just unidentifiable blobs trying to stay afloat in a sea of black hopelessness. These can be made out of marzipan or some mashed up, re-formed chicken hearts left over from a badly improvised Satanic ritual. Goths love thrift! Your Goth child will be impressed with your handy use of blood sacrifice leftovers.


Your Goth child will also appreciate the diseased and dying little people you can make to cling precariously to the side of the cake. Use lots of dessicated coconut in the pastry (Goths love coconut!) and be sure to burn the edges just enough to give your decorative figures that "singed in eternal damnation" look. Use a Hieronymous Bosch painting full of pain and suffering as inspiration. Find and apply the most unappetisting raisins you have, to make the aghast look of unending pain on the biscuit faces especially tortured.
The face of your Goth child when you reveal the Grief Cake for Bleak Kids. Revel in the misery and horror you have given to your little one; be sure to capture the grinding unhappiness drowning their soul on camera. When they cry and demand a Marks and Spencers chocolate caterpillar and promise not to wear their removable blood splatter tattoos at the dinner table any more, get them to sign that prepared contract you've had in a drawer since puberty broke into your house... and relax. These moments are what parenthood are all about.

Gateaux Mayo Marveilleux

I am a woman and therefore I am always craving chocolate, cake, biscuits and sweets. I am in a permanent state of resistance, nobly denying myself such things; I preface every nibble of confectionary with an insincere 'Oh, I shouldn't...'

That's all bullshit, of course. I don't have a very dominant sweet tooth; I don't get excited about cupcakes or chocolate boxes or find myself laden with multipacks of KitKats at the supermarket. Every now and then, I will have a stupidly strong desire for the flat white icing on a factory made Bakewell tart. Sometimes I'll make toast just to have spoonfuls of jam with it. But that's rare and I'll nearly always prefer a bowl of chips, a cheese board or heap of cream crackers dipped in Marmite over a wedge of chocolate fudge brownie cheesecake. I wonder if I'm missing out on the sexual, emotional and spiritual fulfilment the TV adverts promise. If only I could be so transported, so moved, so enriched by a single bite of a Flake or a small corner of a Galaxy bar...

Then, as I flipped idly through my collection of horrible cookery books, I found not one but two recipes for women just like me: fake cakes! Cakes that aren't actually cakes and are in fact savoury treats! That cake at the top of this post is NOT a cake. Behold: the mayo gateau!


It looks delicious, doesn't it? That whippy white frosting, the sprinkles, the moist layers within... well, wipe your chin, it's not a cake, none of that is sugar or cream, it's a MAYONNAISE COATING all over a white sandwich loaf, filled with CREAMED SARDINES.

Here's the second mayo gateau I found, photographed in glorious black and white:

Every baby shower, every 'girlie night in', every gathering of women with synchronised PMT should have one of these. So much better than a pyramid of cupcakes or a three tier cake stand loaded with petit fours. The mayo gateau is the rarest of feminine fantasies realised: a woman can eat cake without actually eating cake, and when she says 'Oh, I shouldn't...' she can, for the first time, really, really mean it.

Googly Eye Pie

I bought an enormous blue cookbook a few months ago. It looked alluringly serious and modern, promising astounding concoctions and constructions that would fit the Albert Adria / Heston Blumenthal molecular gastronomy trend. Marzipan telephones fitted with LEDs that light up when the doorbell goes, pigeon stew served inside clay pigeons that have to be shot out of the sky before eating, whole poached salmon fitted with magnets that can be manipulated to swim upstream in a fake tabletop river of the finest seafood bouillon, that kind of thing.

The book is not quite like that. It was published in 1960 and is full of illustrations as well as photos; the low quality photographs and high technical accuracy of the drawings make it difficult to tell them apart. I have spent quite a lot of time inspecting the images, trying to guess what I'm looking at - a studio snap of a real dish or a coloured-in sketch of something someone described? I don't always guess correctly: the fact the food looks like clown make-up spread on a plate in almost all the images doesn't help distinguish between photography and pencil drawing.

Then I saw this capon in pastry.

I thought it was a drawing. The bright red comb on the capon's head and the fussy detail of the doily suggested it was a drawing: a bit unrealistic, a bit too much effort to pass as a photograph. But the pastry looked, at second glance, very realistic - the texture looks appetising, flaky and golden and with enough variation in the colouring to suggest this is a photograph of something baked in an actual oven and not whipped up with a few strokes of a brown crayon.

Then it became clear that the puzzling thing about this image was not its unclear medium, but the actual dish itself.

It's so unnecessarily creepy.


Why? Why keep the feet sticking out of the crust? Why keep the head with its garish red comb and sharp beak in a half-squawk at the other end? Why? Why coat both in a glaze that makes the capon look like it's sweating out some sort of avian pox?

WHY MUST IT HAVE A GOOGLY EYE?


That eye can move. That eye will roll around, either in pain or disdain when attempts are made to carve its pastry body. That eye will remain on the plate when the rest of the capon has been eaten, looking up at you from a cluster of crumbs and bones. That eye will remain intact and unblinking even as it is dropped into the bin after the meal. That eye looking at you for the rest of your life. That eye is the price you have to pay if you ever want to put a capon in pastry. Whether it's a photo or a drawing, it's a warning: googly eye pie is watching you. Bake with caution.

Plenty Swank

I find buffets quite stressful. When confronted with an enormous spread of food which I can approach in any way I fancy, in quantities and combinations completely of my choosing, I panic slightly. I'll expend an extraordinary amount of mental energy planning what to have, running through all the possible ways I could assemble my first plate and what I would have on my second plate if I can manage it. For a short, frenzied period, my brain whirs like a computer, calculating how much of that I could manage and whether or not it would complement that or would that have to be assigned to plate #2 because it's going to overpower the taste of that and how much do I like that in the first place, should I even put any on my plate...

I have improved my buffet technique over the years and can now sidle up to a spread quite nonchalantly, without the swivel-eyed, tense and awakward frenzy of before. I put small amounts of whatever looks good on to my plate and then go back for either more of what I particularly liked or whatever I didn't try on my first go.

That's what I do now. Most of the time. At probably every other buffet I've been to. Except wedding buffets - my restraint, as in so many things at weddings, does not apply. And kids' birthday parties; I'm supposed to be setting an example to children by finishing everything on my plate and not rejecting anything on offer so there is rather a lot of cramming and third, fourth, fifth trips to the table. And hotel breakfasts - those don't count because I'm on holiday and I've got to try a bit of everything even if it means I'm going to feel faint the rest of the day because I'M ON HOLIDAY AND I PAID FOR THAT MASSIVE COLD MEAT PLATTER. And... buffet lunches provided at work are also exempt from my Good Buffet technique because it's a work thing and you've got take 100% of perks when offered to you in your job or you're losing out (and Tesco Value sausage rolls are remarkably resilient and will last at least two more lunches if you take whatever is left on the floppy foil tray...)

On reflection, perhaps my Good Buffet technique needs refreshing. Here is a book I bought from a charity shop in Farringdon which I am hoping will give me guidance.


This book opens with diagrams of how guests should navigate the buffet table and how hosts should lay their tables for the convenience of their plate-toting guests without losing any glamour or decorative allure. Later pages have recipes and theme suggestions, such as 'All Time Favourites!', those favourites being two types of exquisitely shaped and decorated loose human stool and a tray of squeaky novelty dog toys. Those are not my favoured buffet items.

The instructions for 'Duchess Franks' is to slit frankfurters lengthways, nearly all the way through. Line the slit with slices of ham, place sliced dill pickles and processed American cheese inside then pipe mashed potato on top to create a processed meat cream doughnut. For a laugh. Obviously. Not for the taste sensation. Because all the flavour in the photo is in the 'steak' at the front, those neat piles of diarrhoea garnished with chopped bogies. They are simply dripping with something foul. If it was Pestilence's turn to make dinner for the other Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Come Dine With Me, this is the buffet dinner he/she would serve.

I can't bring myself to comment on the glistening round turds on the chafing dish. They are all sporting showgirl headpieces made of mushrooms and feathered toothpicks. They are filled with blue cheese and horseradish sauce. There's not much more that can be said, apart from a low, incredulous 'Nooooo...'

There's another dish to be served from a chafing dish which is just a third iteration of shaped minced beef in a sickly sauce: it is, apparently, plenty swank.

Each meatball has a stuffed green olive in its centre. The rice or pilaf looks diseased. The French Cream looks like it's been tipped out of a French letter. It's swank, yes it is, and plenty.

Grapefruit

I enjoy grapefruit, the kind with red or pink flesh.

I also really enjoy collecting cookbooks and cookery magazines from the 1960s and 1970s - the more lurid the photography, the more unappetising the recipes and cookery tips the better. This slim magazine which I found in a charity shop in the mid-2000s for 50p keeps giving and giving.

Within its pages, among tips on how to host the perfect dinner party and 101 ways to make lovely food absolutely revolting by suspending it in aspic, I found an advert for grapefruit.

I initially thought, "Ooh, grapefruit recipes, how interesting." And then on closer inspection, I thought, "OH MY GOD, HOW COULD ANYONE EVEN CONSIDER DOING THAT WITH GRAPEFRUIT?" In order of ascending horror and repulsion, here are the recipes that were deemed worthy of recognition by the grapefruit marketing board.

First: grapefruit salad. Not too awful, as citrus fruit in salad is quite acceptable (by other people - I think it is despicable but can appreciate, in a purely theoretical way, how certain flavours and textures can complement one another.) Here is a grapefruit, cucumber and blue cheese salad, presented in a spectacularly tortured way:

How horrid, but it only set off a mild case of twitches and facial tics in me as I tried to process what it would taste like. Next recipe is chicken a la grapefruit - the speck of French presumably acts as flavour enhancer - with grapefruit wine and grapefruit champagne.

Grapefruit is fragrant and delicate, but easily overwhelms other flavours as its bitterness overrides anything else touching your palate. So, why not drop a wedge in your boutique bubbly to wipe out the subtle marzipan top notes? And how about topping up that complex, floral zinfandel you've been saving with a hefty splash of grapefruit juice? And that chicken? Add grapefruit. Why not? That leg with its tasty, juicy brown meat and salty crispy skin *needs* a good dose of citrus. It nearly works, in all three cases there is potential for interesting flavour combinations but... look at those photos. Just look. The yellow tones look as lurid and unappetising as a selection of urine samples.

Behold: grapefruit coffee and a grapefruit and cheese sandwich! The elaborate presentation with stuffed olive garnish seems to be a desperate distraction from what is obviously wrong with this suggestion for 'elevenses'. Also - can you imagine the disturbing, juicy, bitter flavours flooding your mouth as you bite into that grapefruit segment made confusingly hot with espresso? Can you imagine it? Now try to un-imagine it. Go on, try. You can't. That scar won't heal, not ever.

Could it get worse? It gets worse. Here is a grapefruit omelette.

Omelette. WITH GRAPEFRUIT. Not just a twist of grapefruit juice, or a scattering of grapefruit zest. It's an omelette folded over half a goddamn grapefruit. Those fat yellow segments poke out of the heavy folds of egg like the tongues of seriously ill alcoholics. The omelette seems to be vomiting up grapefruit, retching at its own audacious creation. Somehow that tomato, so plump, so red, so natural and intact with its perky green stalk makes the whole plate so much worse. It decorates this wrong-headed concoction by D. Davis of Phyllis Avenue, Peacehaven, Sussex like the red nose of a clown. As advertisements go, this one is a triumph of reverse psychology: after viewing these recipes with grapefruit in so many horrific applications, I crave grapefruit more than ever. Grapefruit in its purest, unsullied, uncooked, untortured form. Jaffa, circa 1972: you win.

"Sir, your zip"

The train carriage was busy and I couldn't help but make eye contact with the rather jolly middle aged man in a suit who boarded and stood opposite me. He was cheerfully flicking through the free evening paper, and caught my eye again with a friendly little smile when he unwrapped a sweet and put it in his mouth. He was friendly probably because he wasn't sure why I kept sneaking looks at him and was obviously not reading my newspaper.

I kept sneaking looks at him because... because his fly was wide open. I saw that as soon as he got on the train. And I felt a terrible urgency to tell him before he got off then started walking down the street with his zip all the way down, cheerful and jaunty and totally oblivious to his minor self-explosure. But how? How could I tell him without telling the entire train carriage too?

I stared at page 2, page 3 then page 2 again, mind whirring with all the ways I could let him know with the minimum damage to his pride and dignity. Then he got out a pen and started filling in the crossword and an idea came to me. I leaned over and said:

"Can I show you one of the answers?"

Bemused, he handed me his newspaper and pen. I wrote:

"Sir, your zip" in the corner and handed it back.

He gasped and laughed at the same time. "Oh, I DO apologise!" he cried, then held his paper in front of him as he zipped up. "How horrible for you! How embarrassing for me! Oh dear, did you have to see that for a long time?"

I muttered reassurances that no, it hadn't been a long time, I had just noticed it even though I had actually been plotting how to inform him of his sartorial faux pas for at least five stations. I grinned and gurned at him and then pretended to be utterly engrossed in the cryptic crossword. He got off three stops later and gave me a cheerful "Thank you!" as he walked away. I modestly dipped my head in response and went back to my crossword, which did not require any words to do with clothes fastenings to complete.

Originally posted on Londonist, here.

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10 mg dance, 8mg theatre, 3.75 ml science: Side Effects is a performance exploring society's relationship to medicine. Can it make us feel better about what we take to feel better?

REPORT: patient analysis after one dose of dance-theatre SIDE EFFECTS provided by dANTE OR dIE.

PRESCRIPTION: One hour treatment, evening. Taken with one glass of wine (red).

DISPENSING VENUE: Rich Mix, east London.

MEDICATION: dance-theatre piece exploring society's relationship to medicine.

dANTE OR dIE's latest performance is a series of movement sequences and recitations of a life time intake of drugs. Ibuprofen gel for knee pain, cream for pubic lice, the daily contraceptive pill, antidepressant, Pro-Plus to wake-up, Temazepam to get to sleep... these form the rhythms and rituals of normal, everyday lives. Translated into rhythmic and ritualised movement, set to Yaniv Fridel's moving original score, the performers give us back our casual medical consumption as something special, extraordinary.

SIDE EFFECTS: will not cause drowsiness. Some tenderness may occur.

The five performers range from 20 to 75 years old, representing the full set of medicinal needs and whimsies in one lifetime. They are frank but unconfrontational, confessing what Simon Rice takes to combat hairloss and build up muscle. The touching vulnerability in Antigone Avdi's anti-anxiety medicine sequence, the harrowing effects of Betsy Field's heart attack, Terry O'Donovan's recap of medicine from childhood to adulthood and the significance of the Fraggle Rock theme tune are complemented by Laure Bachelot's private, intimate daily routines. The performance is a complete picture of a society ticking along, quietly medicated, pain-free and getting by on 0.5mg of Xanax per day.

Side Effects is a rare glimpse into the emotional relationship we have with our drugs, without judgement, sentimentalism or sensationalism. This is an uplifting, tender exploration of whether or not we feel better about the medicine we take to feel better.

RE-FILLS: Side Effects, at Rich Mix, Sunday 13 February (7.30pm) and at Laban, Tuesday 1 March (7.30pm).

Add An Egg

"But how do you get the sauce to thicken?" Susanna's mother paused with meat cleaver in mid-air, giving the raw pork she had been aggressively mincing a brief respite. "It never separates when you make the sauce. I can't stop mine from turning into hot greasy water with flecks of dried scallop in it. How do you do it?"

Susanna's mother stared at her unnervingly and without blinking for a full minute. Just as she braced herself for a possible swipe with that formidable knife (because her mother had an unpredictable sense of humour), she stepped back, and finally blinked. "You need chicken powder," she said. "To make it delicious."

It was a disappointing answer. Chicken powder was the secret ingredient that was her mother's completely not-secret solution to every cooking conundrum. Anything that was not 100% mouth-wateringly flavoursome during cooking got a spoonful of chicken powder just before serving and was thereafter a massive hit. It was a particularly disappointing answer for Susanna because she had tried chicken powder in all sorts of dishes in her own kitchen. The result was a series of meals that tasted of nothing but a well-known brand of high salt content flavour enhancer.

"I've tried that," whined Susanna. "It doesn't work. The sauce still separates and the chicken powder just floats on top. I make it just the way you make it and still comes out wrong." Susanna's mother glared at her. After two minutes of concentrated glaring, she spoke. "You must add an egg. That is the only way to make the chicken powder work." Susanna didn't understand, and said so. "Chickens need eggs!" shouted her mother in reply. "It's like adding water to milk powder, you need to give the powder what was taken away from it."

The conversation was turning into another convoluted, confusing, emotionally charged fact-abusing grudge match. "That's ridiculous. I add water to the chicken powder to bring out the flavour, why would adding an egg be better? It's water that's been taken out of the chicken and putting water back in should be what makes the chicken powder work. An egg is just... stupid." That was the wrong word and they both realised that a moment too late. "Stupid? So all these years you've been eating my stupid food and liking it? Doesn't that make you stupid?" was her mother's retort. It hurt Susanna, not that her mother called her stupid but because there was a logic to the retort that she couldn't challenge. "Okay, it's not stupid, and therefore, no, I'm not stupid but still... do you really add egg to chicken powder? How, why would it work better than just some water?"

Susanna's mother visibly calmed herself and then composed her face into her Old Wise Woman look. "You need to know, my daughter, that chickens and eggs have special relationships with one another. If you have one, you must have the other. They cannot operate alone. Every time you use chicken powder, you must add an egg too. It is nature. It is true."

There was a ghastly silence. "What... what are you talking about?" Susanna managed to eventually splutter. "Chickens and eggs are two completely separate things. Why... why would you add an egg every time you use chicken powder? You don't add chicken to every egg dish you cook! That would be ridiculous, you'd have to stick a drumstick onto every fried egg!"

"Ah, but I do!" said her mother mysteriously, clearly relishing her own fake mysticism. Then, just in case her Oriental enigma was too mystifying for her thick youngest daughter, she spoke again. "Not a whole drumstick each time, but I do sprinkle a bit of chicken powder on the yolks. Or over the top of an omelette. And if it's a boiled egg, I always shell them and roll them in a little bit of chicken powder and white pepper. You've always liked that. I'm surprised you haven't learned to do that for yourself by now."

Suddenly indignant, Susanna blurted out: "I have never rolled my boiled eggs in chicken powder before eating them. Never. I have never done that. I think eggs can taste fine without chicken flavouring."

"Well, you're not a very good cook then, are you?" sneered her mother, abandoning all her Old Wise Woman affectations. "You just don't understand, you just don't want to understand the importance of chicken to egg. And egg to chicken! Eggs are the essence of chickens!"

They were both screeching now. "How is an egg the essence of a chicken?" shrieked Susanna. "Because that's what chickens are when they come into being!" her mother shrieked back. "They all start life as eggs! So when you try to add chicken flavour to something with chicken powder which is nothing but dead chicken, you need to give it back its essence." Susanna flailed her arms helplessly at this. She had one chance to blow up this whole theory and return to normality.

"And adding chicken powder to eggs? What the hell is that?"

"You are giving the eggs a chance to know their potential flavour as chickens. You give the eggs a chance to taste better, by adding the flavour of what they could have been if they had been hatched."

There was no beating that. Susanna quietly accepted the one kilo tin of chicken powder her mother gave her after their unusually quiet dinner together. She held it on her lap on the bus home and idly turned it over to read the ingredients. Among the additives, salts and starches listed, there was also egg. Susanna kept the tin after she used up all the chicken powder; it was something she wanted to give her own daughter one day.

Switzerland's Seventies Waiting Room

Yes, it was still the 1970s in the waiting room while it was 2010 outside. Decades had gone by, as they should have, streaming past the windows in changing blurs of fashion, technology and politics. The small group inside the room often stood looking out or peered anxiously from their sticky brown leather chairs at the rapidly changing scenery outside, an intimidating aurora borealis of transformation that looked unbearable to them. It was nicer inside, on the sofas, with everything as it was in 1971-1979. Just in case anyone wanted to go outside, wanted to leave the waiting room, there was a coat rack in the reception area, full of 2010 clothing plus a few key gadgets so that the emerging man or woman could pass off into the 21st century crowd immeditately. How they fared a day, a week, a month, a year after leaving the waiting room was up to them. Very few of them wanted to leave.

Occasionally, some risked going outside. They were the ones who took up training, absorbed a bit of briefing on .mp3s and mobile phones and smoothies and Ikea and the multiple types of espresso-based hot, iced or frappe drinks that were acceptable to drink on public transport and on the streets. Some embraced the idea of 2010, got snobby about the grey and brown food that was regularly served up in cut glass serving bowls and shuddered at the array of savoury food in aspic that were the party pieces each Friday evening. These rare characters grew impatient with the phone that didn't display the number being dialled, had no text service or message retrieval system. They didn't like the manual typewriters and ribbons and paper and correction fluid, whining for a bigger screen, automatic spelling correction, cut and paste witthout any actual glue or scissors. These were the ones who clawed at the waiting room door, just dying to get into the world that delivered mail electronically.

They were few and far between, these types; they were not missed when they did eventually leave the waiting room. The remaining women would sigh and return to cutting their dress patterns, the men would go back to studying their Haynes manuals, and once the door closed behind the exiting 1970s person, everyone remaining would settle more comfortably onto the sofas, relaxing after the anomaly had gone. It was always the 1970s in the waiting room. There was nothing wrong with that.

Wipe Clean Surfaces

Photo courtesy of Will Wiles.

Maria kept wiping the plastic cover on her armchair with a damp sponge, until the repeated application of diluted washing up liquid wore through the seat cover. Rather than stop with the sponge, Maria simply added a second plastic cover directly on top of the first. There was, by this point, a third sheet of wipe-clean PVC on the coffee table and dining table. And she was so afraid of soiling her bedsheets by touching them, there was a clear plastic dustsheet over the bed, on top of which she laid newspaper and her second best blanket, so she could sleep without spreading her biological contamination to her precious soft furnishings.

She was taking things too far, her son and daughter agreed at Christmas. Maria had served them Christmas dinner in compartmentalised plastic trays, the kind schoolchildren and prison inmates are given as a sort of aesthetic and culinary punishment. When Margaret tried to combine turkey, stuffing and a scrap of charred bacon onto the same forkful, Maria burst into tears and accused Margaret of ruining the meal. Rob accused Maria of becoming a mad old woman who no one wanted to visit. It was an unfortunate cue for Maria to blurt out what she had wanted to say to her two disgusting children for years: "I don't want you to visit me, you horrible, filthy, dirty people!" So they stopped visiting Maria and Maria continued to wipe all her wipe-clean surfaces in a gruelling daily regime.

Five years passed. Rob had two children. Margaret moved in with her boyfriend. It was time to make peace with their mother, who deserved a place in their lives, no matter how mad and difficult she had become since that calamitous Christmas. They agreed to visit together and support one another through the usual traumatic, exhausting cleaning ritual Maria insisted on each time they came; multiple hand-washing, a shoe then foot inspection, two different types of mouthwash, a complete change of clothes, hairnets, face masks, goggles, and absolutely no contact with any furniture, walls or undesignated areas on the linoleum floor. They stood at the door, nervously debating who should press the doorbell and subsequently have to endure an extra cleaning exercise around the fingernails.

The door opened without either of them pressing the doorbell. Maria had clearly been standing in the corridor for a while. She lowered the extending arm she had used to open the door, and remained in the perfect centre of the hallway, exactly halfway between all the rooms in the flat.
"Mum? Can we come in?" asked Margaret tentatively. Maria mumbled something in reply. Rob looked at the plastic sheeting on the floor, the walls and over each doorway. "Mum, are you okay? Can you... can you move?" asked Rob. Maria again mumbled something in reply, her voice seeming to rise slightly. Margaret and Rob began to panic. Whereas she was infuriatingly mad before, this was scary and creepy mad, and her muffled voice was indicating something drastically awful had happened since they last came to visit. Fearing a stroke or other paralysing medical malady, Rob rushed forward into the flat towards his mother, feeling a sudden burst of filial duty towards the impossible old woman. "I'll take you to the doctor, Mum, I'll make sure you get better!" he cried. Maria shot out the extending arm and caught Rob full in the face with an antibacterial spray, making him drop in the doorway in spitting, pine-scented agony. Margaret recoiled in horror, from her hacking, wheezing brother and her horribly still mother who was standing in the middle of the hallway, unmoving, unmoved by the surprise attack on her own boy.

Forgetting every stringent rule in the house, Margaret strode angrily into the flat, batting away the extending arm and antibacterial spray her mother was brandishing at her, determined to reach the old cow and make her speak up, speak clearly and explain herself. Margaret was strong; she had lately taken up military fitness classes in the local park and was proud of her new resilience to the mud and the sweat and the grass stains of her training. An old woman with a cleaning obsession was not going to upset her, and she ruthlessly wrestled the old woman down to the shiny plastic sheet covered linoleum. "What are you doing, Mum?" she screamed as she got Maria onto the ground. Maria gave off muffled, incoherent cries and Margaret lost her temper: she pulled the face mask off her mother's face and felt her fingers slide, almost frictionless across a smooth plastic surface. She saw her own spittle on a piece of heavy plastic sheeting, beneath which her mother's furious face glared at her. The plastic sheeting extended into a tight seal around her neck and continued down her body underneath her lab coat and tracksuit bottoms. She rustled and squeaked as she tried to get away from Margaret. Margaret backed away as best she could from this horrible wipe-clean hybrid her mother had become. Wordlessly, she tried to get up and get out of the flat but the floor was covered in plastic sheeting and she slipped, again and again and never made it to the door.

Rob, through his streaming, stinging eyes, watched helplessly as his mother donned a third pair of rubber gloves and dragged his sister across the hallway into the kitchen. He could see four or five bottles of bleach lined up by the sink and a neat stack of scouring pads on top of the fridge. He cried out hoarsely at his sister but she had been effectively knocked out by Maria's combination of brute force, toilet wipes and a heavy blow from a steam cleaner nozzle. "Don't do this Mum! Don't do this to Margaret! Let her go!" Maria turned to Rob in the doorway and shook her head, almost sadly, then turned away. As the door closed, Rob heard the faint squeak of plastic on plastic as Maria trudged into the kitchen to begin her new cleaning project.

Door To Door To Door

Photo courtesy of Will Wiles.

The local authorities couldn't have anticipated it but they were rather shortsighted to heap all the doors together in the car park like that. Doors are trouble; they slam, they trap hands and break fingers, they get broken down, kicked in, locked up. They remember.

Doors are like mirrors: if you think about them too long, have too many of them together at funny angles, take them at a metaphorical level, they cause trouble and can twist the even the most sensible, steady mind. They really should have paid a little money for a wood chipper, or at the very least, a man with an axe. The unfortunate incidents of Wednsday night could have been avoided entirely.

Graham Barker was the first to notice something odd. He was returning from the park where he had just walked his dog when he saw the old woman five doors up from him emerging from one of the doors heaped by the main entrance. She was carrying a tea tray with three mugs of tea balanced on it and she clearly hadn't expected to serve up to Graham and his growling Staffordshire cross 12 floors below her living room. "What are you doing here?" she shouted at Graham, unreasonably, he thought. "What the fuck are you doing here?" he shouted back. She merely huffed, turned around and went back through the door, only to reappear at another door, mugs of tea rattling on the tray. She glared at Graham, clearly blaming him for this strange turn of events. "I'll call the council on you!" she snarled.

Another door opened and a small child ran through, screaming with laughter. He toppled over in surprise at finding himself outside, by the main entrance instead of in his bedroom where he was intending to hide from his brother. He looked up at Graham from the ground, bewilderment making him stammer: "Did... did... did I d-d-die?" he asked. Four grown-ups, unknown to Graham suddenly appeared at four other doors: a woman in a towel, fragrant and steaming slightly from her bath, a young man eating toast and wiping a butterknife on his trouser leg, an elderly man squinting at a Chinese newspaper and a teenage girl somehow managing to paint her nails, text a message on her mobile phone and eat a chocolate bar at the same time. They all looked around in confusion and then the shouting and gibbering started. Graham decided to go upstairs to his home, where he was going to smoke an extra strong spliff and pretend that he hadn't seen anything. Luckily, his ex-girlfriend had tried to set fire to his flat only the week before and she had managed to torch off half his front door. As he ducked through the gap into his flat, he was quite certain he wouldn't accidentally end up back at the main entrance, and he was gratified to find himself in his hallway with his five new shiny council refurbishment doors around him. He started assembling his spliff right there, next to the kitchen; it had been a strange afternoon and he didn't want to remember any of it.

For the rest of the day, the shouting, gibbering and crying continued by the pile of doors left by the main entrance. More and more residents were coming through the doors, expecting to be in their living rooms, bedrooms, toilets and kitchens but finding themselves by the main entrance with dozens of other confused and scared residents instead. Some were too scared to re-enter the building, others charged back into their homes defiantly, others blustered and screamed obscenities at the pile of doors, believing that somehow that would fix the situation.

One particularly dramatic neighbour proposed burning the doors, suggesting some of voodoo curse was upon them. By this time, half the building's residents had teleported through their doors to the pile outside the main entrance and having had no better idea themselves, they agreed. Petrol was brought out, a lighter was found, the blaze began. Residents stood around the fire, silent and fearful until the last door crumbled into the ashes. Then they began to drift back upstairs to their homes, only to find they couldn't get in. And the ones who stayed inside found they couldn't get out. They had burned their doors. No exit, no entrance. Graham leaned against the doorframe to his kitchen, looking longingly at the Jaffa Cakes next to the sink, his spliff now down to a soggy half-inch in his fingers. He couldn't go in there; he tried but how ever many steps he took, he'd find himself back in the doorway again like on an infinite, futile loop. The same with the toilet and his bedroom. He sat down in his hallway, surrounded by doors he couldn't walk through and dragged deeply on his spliff. His last thought as he drifted into uncomfortable sleep on the floor was that he was going to have to call the council in the morning... the new doors were rubbish...

Vino de Mesa

It was as awful as it promised to be, and worse.

The credit crunch dinner date at Jim's house had been compiled with a certain amount of young hipster irony and genuine necessary economy. He and Steve were still getting to know one another and it was risky but cheap to have Steve come over for a homecooked meal: he budgeted for 50 per cent pasta, 5 per cent pesto and 45 per cent affordable booze to ensure Steve would stay over and they could both afford to buy lunch the next day at work. Times were hard for everyone but that was no reason not to see one another for dinner, a DVD, some wine and some quality time together, right?

The dinner was established a failure early on, however, when Jim served reheated butterbeans mixed with a tin of tuna in brine because Steve had recoiled in horror at the gluten-rich pasta and possible nut allergy inspiring pesto. And the two individual cartons of Tesco Value Vino de Mesa were meant to be an amuse bouche rather than the main tipple for the evening, as Jim had assumed that Steve would bring something far superior (ie. actually drinkable), seeing as he was the dinner guest. He arrived empty handed, and they sat with their bowls of hot fishy beans, glasses of tap water and cartons of foul Vino de Mesa, pretending to find it hilarious while stealing furtive, miserable glances at the kitchen clock.

"I found someone's bus pass on my way here," stammered Steve when the ghastly silence became unbearable. "I don't know what to do with it."

"Let me see," said Jim with obvious delight that conversation might be revived. He turned the slim plastic wallet over in his hands and then flipped it open. He nonchalantly flipped through the out of date tickets, crumpled receipts and wadded flyers and junk mail shoved into the sleeves. Then he noticed the little gleam of gold at exactly the same time as Steve. "What's that?" they asked each other. Like two Charlie Buckets finding the golden ticket to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, they stared and stared at the gold credit card tucked into the back of the bus pass wallet, disbelieving their own eyes. Jim pushed the cartons of Vino de Mesa out of the way and his hand found Steve's across the table, a faint tremble evident in his finger tips. "Get your coat, Steve. We're going out."

Steve did stay over that night. In a suite, at the Hilton, with Jim nestled into the Queen Deluxe bed next to him. Jim snored until dawn; he always did after drinking champagne.

Feeling The Wobbles

The jelly did have blood in it. That's what Mrs Dimbleby meant when she said it was high in iron. Everyone commented on how rich the flavour was, how refreshing and moreish. And it's good for you, she would remind her red-lipped customers. Low in fat and high in vitamins and minerals - it's not a just a light wobbly treat on a summer's day, it's a tonic for whatever deficiency you might be feeling. Ninety or so years ago, she would have made more of the marrow bone jelly in her recipe too but it was no longer the bonus it was, so she kept quiet about that and promoted the jellies as low-carb instead.

They sold extremely well; they always did in this village fete. Even though for generations they had lived in sunlight and went to church, the village folks had the craving in them, even the vegetarians (especially the vegetarians). She supplied the thing they didn't know they wanted, and was always happy to slip an extra free jelly to the most anaemic child or particularly pale young man. Mrs Dimbleby knew her duty to the people, and she served her purpose willingly even though it was over two centuries since she had incurred her debt to the village and the malevolent moors where her incident happened had been a business park since 1962.

"Is there any alcohol in the jelly?" one customer nervously enquired. "Depends on the blood donor!" replied Mrs Dimbleby. She loved that joke and never tired of it, but she longed to wheel out the one she had devised about diabetes. Hardly anyone ever asked if the jelly was sugar-free but she was confident that once the subject was broached, she would deliver the punchline with great effect.

Lucky Duckies

Despite being part of the funfair, it was not a fun event for the ducks. They had suffered the screwing in of hooks to their heads that morning, the pond was far too small them all and they had bobbed about desperately all day hoping to be rescued by a merciful human with a hook on the end of a stick.

Very few ducks got the chance to see the hook for themselves; most ended up on the side of a bath or worse, being flung about down a rushing stream for some rural annual charity duck race. In direct contrast to the uplifting stories of the hook, the stories about duck races were full of calamities and terrible indignities. Survivors recounted, in hushed, traumatised tones, moments of sheer terror and horror, tangled inescapably in weeds and rubbish, hemmed in by discarded condoms and crisp packets and unable to float away to the finish line.

The ducks tried to look as perky as possible in the narrow urn, trying to be the one the hook went for. No duck could confirm what happened to those who got hooked, but it was the pinnacle of a duck's career to be hoisted out of the water, lifted high and dripping to some mystical afterlife of bubble baths and jacuzzis. Each one in the urn prayed that she would be next to be hooked out, yearning for that new and dazzling life beyond the cramped and undignified vessel. However, the day was coming to a close and the remaining ducks were sadly resigning themselves to not being hooked out.

As the last customers rolled up their sleeves and prepared to have a go at hooking a duck, the ducks that got out quietly wept in their sodden black bin liner behind the neatly stacked, suspiciously new plastic crates from the van. They had longed and longed to be hooked out, to be plucked out of the water with cries of delight and deposited into the spectacular afterlife each duck imagined for herself. They wept for themselves, lying crushed and heaped in an undignified pile, in the wet plastic darkness. They wept for their friends still in the urn, still pleading with Fate for an escape via the beloved hook. They wept for their inability to tell them: stay in the water! Avoid the hook! We're in the black bin liner and we're not coming out again! The crates - the crates are full of new ducks!

They sobbed gently together in the bin bag, making room when another duck landed among them, still dripping, still exultant, still unaware that the hook was not their blessing of salvation but the tool of their undoing. They would find out soon enough, and the broken ducks in the bag let them discover the awful truth on their own. Meanwhile, the new ducks were excitedly waiting for the hooks to be screwed into their heads, their shiny yellow faces gleaming with the pride and optimism of box fresh bath accessories.

The View Is Better From Up Here

"[Laughing] It's a real lion! I can't believe it!"
"That's not real. It can't be."
"It's real! Listen to it growl. That's a real lion. I can't believe they've got a real lion in for the lion dance! Look at it go!"
"No! It's not real! It's dangerous. It could eat someone."
"No it wouldn't, they're just going to make it jump around a bit and then..."
[Pause]
"OH MY GOD! IT ATE HIM! IT ATE HIM! OH MY GOD!"
"Wow! One bite, just like that! Wow!"
"Wow! Is that supposed to be good luck?"
"Don't know. Probably... probably not. Not for him anyway."
"Well... Happy New Year!"

Lipstick

They were all the same shade of red. The twist-up tubes, the little pots, the long wands, the pencils, the clever pens with built-in brush that loaded up with pigment at a click of a button... They were all the same colour. It was no good how long she shopped, how hard she worked at it: she always came home with the same black trousers, the same single colour cotton shirts, the same V-neck t-shirts, the same straight on-the-knee skirts. And the same colour lipstick, however hard she was trying for a new look. She quite regularly launched herself into a makeover, only to emerge looking and feeling exactly the same.

She looked at the spread of lipsticks on her bedroom floor and rubbed her temples, willing a new idea to come to her. And eventually one did. She went to bed smiling, pleased with the new version of herself she was going to launch the following day. And the following day, she stepped out of her house, head held high, ready to show off her new look at the office and this time, she was going to be really different. As the traffic swerved and crashed around her, as pedestrians collided while craning to get a look at her, she knew she had achieved something new, bold and unique. Deliberately, she stopped at the corner to apply a touch more lipstick to her midriff and to colour in a smudged patch on the back of her thigh, then she carried on with her hips swinging towards the station, glistening in her head to toe lipstick coating and with a smile on her nude lips.

Three Course Disaster

The cream was meant to go with the apple pie for pudding but an ill-judged, violent dash onto the train just before the doors closed had disastrous consequences. She watched in dismay as the white stain spread across the carriage floor and thought desperately of what to serve instead - custard? Creme fraiche? Ice cream? Or... perhaps the pie didn't need any sort of sauce and she could dish up each slice with a small napkin printed neatly with "Go fucking fuck yourselves!" on it. The dinner party was not her idea, the guests were not her choice, the menu was dish after dish of food she hated and the spilled cream seeping into her shoes was the last straw.

She carefully plucked out the upended pot of cream from the dripping bag of shopping and placed it in the middle of the white pool. Then, side-stepping the widening, glistening cream slick, she stood by the doors, waiting for the next station with a completely blank expression.

As she disembarked from the train, she reached into her shopping bag and pulled out a package of chicken thighs which she flung over her shoulder on to the platform without a backward glance. She continued towards the stairs and the ticket hall, tossing fresh figs and shallots and unwaxed lemons and harissa paste and parma ham and garlic stuffed olives in fierce overarm arcs all around her.

By the time she got through the ticket barrier and onto the street, there were trampled, discarded dinner party items all over the station and a trail of footsteps marking a furious, milky, stamping track up and down the stairs. These ended abruptly in a big splash of thick, sticky red wine and shattered glass, from which a new trail of footsteps led away, red and ominous and unswerving like the fleeing of a killer from the scene of crime, onto the next in a hideous, unhinged spree.

A New Wardrobe for a Growing Girl

Two friends of mine had lots of leftover black velvet from upholstering some armchairs and wanted beanbags made from the material. I offered to cut and sew the beanbags and had a very enjoyable weekend in my living room, sitting at my sewing machine as rain lashed at the windows. I took this photo to capture the perfect contentment of the afternoon and to remind myself to do more sewing, especially if I can please my friends as much as pleasing myself in the process.

Gloria was unable to put it off any longer. She was getting bigger and she needed new clothes. But it was awkward to find new shirts and trousers for her new, much more unwieldy figure. She was more self-conscious than she had ever been since her expansion had begun. The symptoms of a major change had started a year ago and she had tried all sorts of things to resist the new shape her body seemed to be pursuing completely against her will. But one morning, she woke up, feeling uncomfortable, breathless and aching and she knew it had finally happened. Gloria emerged from bed a different person, still recognisable as herself but irredeemably changed. And it was time, though it was with great regret that she acknowledged it, to wear new and better fitting clothes.

With a sigh, Gloria opened her wardrobe and selected the clothes she could tackle straightaway. Jeans and cotton shirts could be adjusted fairly easily, opening a few seams, sewing new material in; there was going to be a lot of patching and adding but until she could muster the courage to go shopping out in public, this would have to do. She spent some time undoing stitches, widening armholes, cutting panels and tacking in new material until it was time to move on to the sewing machine. As she pressed her foot to the pedal and the first line of stitches appeared on her light blue shirt, she knew this was it: the confirmed start of her new life with her new body. Though she felt a little sad, she pressed on and worked the rest of the day, sewing an extra sleeve to each shirt and an extra leg to each pair of trousers.

Serves Four

I ate it all myself. The second spoon was for the chocolate sprinkles I added on top. That night, I dreamt my hands had turned the same shade of yellow as the custard in the trifle and everytime I touched something, it turned yellow too. I woke up sucking my thumbs and a corner of the duvet.

The next time I went to the supermarket, I picked up a tiramisu for two. When I went to sleep, I was at home in my bed and dreamt that I was in the olive grove behind a beautiful Tuscan farmhouse. A young man called Marco was walking away, bare chested, smiling over his shoulder at me as I lay on the warm, dry grass.

I went to the supermarket this evening. I bought a tiramisu again. This one serves six.