|
I was in the
supermarket the other day, and I hadn't had much sleep the night before
so I didn't know why I was there. I had a small bottle of original Robinsons
orange squash - not the awful 'No Added Sugar' version, but the hard stuff
- and that was all I really needed but I felt bad about just buying that
and walking out so I walked around a bit. For an excuse I thought that
it would be nice to have one of those 500ml strawberry flavoured yoghurts
but the supermarket just had small strawberry flavoured yoghurts
and
500ml vanilla versions, which I didn't like. Or, I thought I wouldn't
like. I haven't actually tasted them but I assume they would be bland.
What are they for? Are they like cooking apples, but yoghurt? Do you add
your own fruit later on, in which case where from? A tin of strawberries
would be too big to mix with the yoghurt, and anyway the end result would
be a gigantic yoghurty mess. It sounds incredible, actually. I'm really
hungry.
Anyway, I walked around a lot trying to think of something to buy. I used
to spend ages sitting around wondering what to get before going to the
shop, until I realised that it would be better to reverse the problem
and go to the shop and look at everything on the shelves and buy the things
that appealed to me at the time. It doesn't work any better though. I
just end up staring at cheese and wondering what it would be like to eat
it, and standing around holding a shopping basket. And if I'm feeling
hungry I buy lots of stuff and if I'm feeling full I buy very little and
if I'm feeling thirsty I buy lots to drink, because although I can mentally
picture the future in my mind I can't get my body to imagine how it will
feel in the future so I end up just reacting to the present.
I found myself staring at a bag of peas. They were Gontar Peas. I think.
I can't remember what it said and although I picked up the bag and thought
about buying them I realised that I would feel very silly when the tiredness
wore off and I started to think properly again. They were 65 pence, I
think, which isn't much but I'm not made of money and where would I put
them? The instructions for cooking seem a bit extreme. You have to soak
them overnight and then cook them for hours. I don't want to do that.
What's the point in cooking something you have bought from Sainsburys?
It's still going to taste like processed muck, but it'll just take you
longer to find out. It's like in Marks and Spencers they have packaged
takeaway chinese food and so on, but it's no cheaper than going to a takeaway
where they cook the food for you and it tastes nicer. I don't understand.
|
|
A gigantic pea |
|
I didn't know
what kind of peas they were. I always assumed that peas were peas but
these were Gontar Peas. Gunnar peas. Whatever. I remember that the name
was a bit macho, but not quite. Like 'Gunner' peas but 'Gonto' peas instead.
Gonzo peas. I'll look them up tomorrow if I don't forget. I have to go
back to the shop to buy tomorrow's food. I bought some marrowfat processed
peas which are the nicest type of pea by far, big and meaty. Some people
say that peas are the food equivalent of polystyrene packing material,
they just fill you up without giving you a taste sensation, but that's
wrong. They're great. Except for the small hard ones which are awful.
I also got some Smash mashed potato - it was just below and to the left
of the Gontar Peas which is why I am writing this now. 'Made with real
potato' it said, although trying to make people associate a dirt-covered,
fist-sized chunk of carbohydrate with a thick white paste that goes gloopy
in boiling water is a thankless task. And I bought some peas, the marrowfat
ones and the Smash and some Quorn burgers and I'm going to cook them.
I've just got one bowl but I'll manage. Well, I did manage because I am
writing this long after the events that I am describing, but I'm temporarily
role-playing, in which case the fact that I am writing about the future
does not faze me, not one little bit, no sirree.
I looked at the back of the packet and it said they were from the Middle
East, I think. They weren't beans, they were peas. Most definitely peas.
Peas are a very English thing. You can't imagine French people eating
peas to unwind because that would be silly. Peas are Alan Bennett and
all Rover saloons that came before the SD1. When 'Spitting Image' had
the puppet of John Major, our dullest post-war Prime Minister with the
exception of the one before Harold Wilson and the one who was James Callaghan,
they had him eating peas to symbolise dullness. They didn't have him eating
beans because that would be what cowboys eat and cowboys are interesting.
They didn't have him eating carrots because that would make him like Bugs
Bunny and they didn't have him eating rhubarb because that's comical and
they didn't have him eating lettuce because that would make him a rabbit
and they didn't have him eating chips because that would make him Bernard
Manning. Although you might not appreciate Bernard Manning you would have
to admit that he isn't likely to provoke boredom in the minds of those
people exposed to him.
|
|
The pen is less mighty than the sword |
| Dating In Hong Kong On FirstClickFriend.Com Offers Online Dating Services And Online Personals For All Regions In Hong Kong. Dating In Hong Kong Can Be Really Successful Ith FirstClickFriend.Com
And the bag
of peas were in my hands and I was looking at them. Gontar Peas. How on
earth are you supposed to know what to do with them? Do people grow up
with a manual in their heads that says 'You must eat Gontar Peas on a
Sunday after tea but only in months that taste of hemlock and the sun
has fallen down'? I think not. I don't even know what Gontar Peas look
like because they were shrivelled-up in the packet, which was a nice-feeling
packet, it had a give to it like a chair, it didn't seem to be hard and
although you could smother somebody with it you couldn't use it as a weapon
or something. There were instructions on the back but they didn't say
anything about the cultural place the peas held, or their history or what
they were good for. There were lots of normal peas around it which struck
me as odd too, because you get peas in cans with water and you get peas
in bags that are frozen, it just seems silly to duplicate so much storage
effort, you could just find the optimal way of delivering peas and stick
with that. If only they'd try packaging them in other ways. In crisp packets,
or in pringles-style dispensers.
It's funny that beans won the war. Heinz pride themselves on their beans,
they are a prime foodstuff for many people, they were featured in 'Blazing
Saddles', whereas peas, which are very similar but tastier and nicer to
look at, have so far failed to capture the imagination of the
public.
It's like the battle between Betamax and VHS, or 'Terra Nova' by Looking
Glass, or the unstoppable rise of Tom Hanks - I mean he was just a b-list,
young-looking actor in the odd film now and again, and there was a time
when if you'd lined up Steve Guttenberg and Tom Hanks and asked the public
to pick which one would be a film star in a decade people would have said
Steve Guttenberg. They were similar but Tom Hanks obviously knew the right
people because he's got two Academy Awards and he's a famous film star
and director, whereas Steve Guttenberg is nowhere. Thus it is with peas.
You can buy them, but comparing them with beans is like comparing a generic
vacuum cleaner with a Hoover - when you say 'Hoover' people assume that
you mean 'vacuum cleaner' and so when you say 'bean' people think that
you mean 'vegetable' so that even if you ask somebody for rhubarb or lettuce
you sometimes get beans instead. You'd think that the frustration this
causes would have led to complaints and a consumer revolution but no,
not a bit of it. People are happy to let peas languish in obscurity. And
so am I. It means they're more exclusive. I know that when I eat peas,
they are not being eaten by some common street trash. Refined people eat
peas. Old money eats peas. Autechre just do normal Warp-y techno music
with lots of clever sound effects instead of drum loops. Why are people
scared to say this? Life's too short to spend all your time nodding and
agreeing with people because you don't want to look stupid. 'But the clever
sound effects are the point!' you say. I'll remind you of that when you're
either a hollow shell, or listening to show tunes when you're fifty, not
that either of us will be around then, because firstly you don't exist,
you're just a disembodied voice in a long rant about peas, and secondly
you will never grow old because you're a disembodied voice. Is a fully-realised
fictional character as real as a real person? Is Romeo as real as William
Shakespeare, given that we know more about the former than the latter?
We can't see into people's minds; therefore, people do not need minds.
Will I know any of the people I know now when I am fifty? Doubt it. We
have little enough in common today. Will I get better as I get older?
Probably not. I look back at some of the stuff I've done and it's as if
it was by a different person, I couldn't do it today.
|
|
Shakespeare |
|
This does
not haunt me at three o'clock on a Monday morning. Mortality haunts me
at three o'clock on a Monday morning. Unless I am hungry in which case
thoughts of my utter insignificance to people living in China, in India,
in France, in Liverpool, just down the street do not enter my head as
I have other things to occupy my mind. That's what life is, really. A
series of things we do to stop ourselves thinking about dying and the
world going on without us as if we had never been there. I don't even
know what my Grandfather's first name was, and there is only one picture
of him that is still around, and I'm his grandson. It took about fifteen
years for him to be completely forgotten by the world. When my parents
die I will forget them too and there will be nobody to forget me because
there is nobody to remember me.
I'll look up what type of peas they were tomorrow. They probably weren't
Gontar Peas. I'm just getting mixed up with something from the ancient
computer game 'MDK'. There are bagpipes now. Probably the first alt-rock
record to have bagpipes in such a dramatic fashion. You don't get that
every day. It's not Autechre now, although in a way it is Autechre now,
because I'm going through this and rewriting bits and adding bits and
whilst Autechre were not playing just now, they are as I write this.
Will they have peas in the future? Do vegetables go through fashions and
trends like everything else? Perhaps in two hundred years potatoes will
be utterly obscure, the kind of thing that only bearded computer programmers
eat, and everybody will be eating yams instead. Fruit goes through trends
- until the 1960s, bananas and other tropical fruit were extremely rare
and trendy because of wartime rationing. It's odd that we still have corned
beef and spam, both of which I think were caused by wartime rationing.
They both taste horrible and we are no longer at war so there's no point
having them. That said, you can buy those American army meals over the
internet so perhaps people are using corned beef and spam as a culinary
WW2 theme park, as a roller-coaster ride for the tastebuds back to 1939.
|
|
MDK |
|
Why did the
people in the war decide to blow up cows and pigs? There were plenty of
guns and aeroplanes and tanks and other cool machines, but for some reason
the war must have been fought by people who had a thing about cows and
pigs. Perhaps it was part of a terror bombing campaign to terrify the
population with bombing. Plymouth and Liverpool and other cities like
that were bombed but people didn't care because a burning city is obviously
not particularly disturbing, but the sight of chopped-up, blasted bits
of pigs and cows flying through the air in a meat apocalypse would put
the fear of God into me and I'm a sophisticated 21st-century person, so
people from just before the middle of the 20th century would have been
terrified at the sight of a vast whirlwind of meat spiralling out from
the farmlands.
It's gone a bit Mike Oldfield now. I wasn't expecting that.
Bloody hard targets to hit, though. Bombing Plymouth must have been easy
because it stretches along the coast for a couple of miles and goes inland
for a couple more, whereas a pig from above is about four feet by one
foot, if it's standing at right-angles. I mean, if you drop a big bomb
on a field where they are grazing you probably get one or two blown-up
pigs but that's a waste, like nerve gas. It's like some types of nerve
gas are powerful enough to kill you if you so much as have a couple of
tiny, tiny drops fall on your skin, but unless you could somehow equip
a bomber with millions of little needles that fly into people's heads
from above, you'd need to spray gallons and gallons of the stuff over
a town to be sure of getting everybody. Unless you could put the nerve
gas inside sweets and drop them from a great height, but then they would
have to be very tough sweets like gobstoppers, and who is going to eat
a sweet that has fallen on the ground? You'd have to package them, and
even then I would think twice about eating a packet of sweets that had
fallen on the ground, even if the packet was obviously unopened and unmolested.
It's like, if you saw a can of Pepsi in the friend and you had forgotten
that you had bought it, sorry, not in the friend, in the fridge, and you
had forgotten that you have bought it you might consider drinking it,
and then you would. But if it was sitting on a table or a shelf you'd
think twice. And if it was sitting next to the bin, even if the bin was
clean and it didn't look as if it had gunk on it, and the best before
date was still in the future and it was seemingly unmolested, you wouldn't
touch it.
|
|
Mike Oldfield |
|
That's a measure
of people's desperation, isn't it? The depths to which a can of Pepsi
could sink before you drink it is a way of measuring your thirst. If it's
in the fridge you might not even be thirsty before you drink it, and oddly
if I imagine it as being in a muddy field I wouldn't feel too bad
about
drinking it because mud is mud, you know, it's not toxic and it can be
washed off and you could always pour the drink into a glass. But if it
was caught in the crotch of an elderly tramp you wouldn't go near it with
a long pole and a bottle of disinfectant, and even if you washed it thoroughly
afterwards and then put it into a big bunch of other cans of Pepsi you'd
probably be nervous about touching the cans and drinking from them, and
it might even lead to you switching to Coke instead, or vice-versa depending
on how you started.
I can remember going off M&M's when I found one that had gone off in an
otherwise-normal packet and now, if I go to the cinema, I have popcorn
instead. Not that I go to the cinema all that often anymore, which is
a shame as I am really good at watching a film. I'm quiet and I sit right
down in the seat so that the people behind me don't notice. And I don't
even own a mobile phone, and I detest the people who do because they are
obviously too boring to entertain themselves, they have to leech off other
people, it's as if their faces are suckers and they don't have teeth or
anything, just a spike that goes into people's livers.
How come, yeah, those frogs in the jungle have evolved to be really poisonous
so that nothing can eat them, but chickens haven't? Answer that one. It's
not because we farm them, because chickens had plenty of time
until then
to evolve. But they failed completely. They can't fly and they taste nice
and produce eggs. They might as well have 'exploit us' written on their
chests.
I pity you, fool. The bombers never came for the chickens because they
were much too small. Pigs were hard enough but chickens were even smaller.
It's lucky that people stand upright because if we walked on all fours
we would appear, from above, to be much the same size as a pig. Standing
upright, we look tiny. I thought for a moment there that sleeping people
would be at a disadvantage, but because the war was fought between two
sides that were in the same hemisphere and time zone, everybody went to
sleep at the same time so there were no bombers flying at night. There
was basically no war, which means that when the sun runs out of fuel we'll
have a few hours of peace before we all freeze to death. Huddled up in
bed, the heat slowly leaking out forever, we'll wonder what went wrong
and why we are suffering. Then we will be equal.
As a postscript, I have since learned that they were 'Gungo' Peas.
|
|
A small thing |
| |