Repost: Move over, Heston!
During my dim-and-distant days working on a bar, I used to serve a regular whom I shall call J. To say that J was none too bright would be pushing it somewhat: he was a couple of photons short of dark. But he was friendly, and completely harmless, and so we plied him with Coke throughout the evenings until he wandered off somewhere.

J was a bullshitter in the classic sense. He was not a liar; he did not set out to distort or avoid the truth. It's just that he didn't care about the difference between truth and untruth; almost certainly, he didn't even know the difference between truth and untruth; and he very likely didn't care that he didn't know the difference between truth and untruth.

He existed in a wibbly-wobbly world of his own.

He knew that my day job was in a university, and told me that he had been to university. In his case, it was the University of Leek. That particular small Staffordshire Moorlands town may have all manner of things in its favour - but being the home of a seat of higher learning is not one of them. Nevertheless, he'd done at least two degrees at Leek University. One of them was in woodwork; he'd had to build a bird-table to earn that. (Fair enough: there are certain real universities where you don't have to do much more than that to get an MPhil... but I digress.)

His other degree was in cookery.

And my, oh my - what an innovative course that must have been, judging by the recipes he used to recite.

Let's take, for example, one of his recipes for dessert. What you need is some cream and some egg yolks. You beat the cream, add the yolks, and mix them together a bit. Then you add some lemonade. Et voila! Dessert!

To be fair to J, he did have some other dessert recipes in his repetoire. But they all involved - and were basically reducible to - cream and egg yolks.

And I'd hate to give the impression that desserts were all he could do. He could do main courses as well. One of them required that you take some egg yolks, and some cream, and mix them together. Then you add a black olive. Another was much the same, except that you need three black olives to make it.

I no longer work on that bar; but just sometimes, I wonder about J. I wonder whether he's killed himself with food poisoning (or blocked arteries) yet; whether he's killed anyone else. And if not, why isn't he presenting a cookery slot on daytime TV?
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 2 Jul 2012, 16:21, Reply)