We’ve moved house. The cat shat in the bath. Enough said.
We are now looking at piles of boxes in East Devon, the same boxes, but in different configurations. My makeup box is now under a very large box of Anthony’s fishing magazines, on which I administered a couple of wrestling moves before it tore, spilling a glossy image of a carp onto my feet and momentarily leading me to believe I had found a mirror.
The box of vitally important, business related papers are under the box of ill-screwed and perspiring jars, salvaged from the late fridge.
All socks have been lost in transit.
We have less than a fortnight to pull a traditional English tearoom and restaurant out of our collective ass and I can’t even pull a mascara out of a cardboard box.
“I am hideous.” I say to Anthony
“You are beautiful.” He replies
“Shut up idiot.”
“Fine, you’re hideous.”
“Bastard.”
Currently there is no threshold to my unreasonable behaviour.
I had a severely irrational moment when I came across a box of a Spumo guns (these are metal bottles powered with small canisters of N2O gas ((much better utilised as laughing gas)), an invention used by chefs to make perfectly good food into food-flavoured foam).

“Can I chuck them?”
“No.”
“Why not? We’re not going to serve wanky foams in our restaurant.”
“I know, but I still want to keep them.”
“Why?”
“I just do.”
“You’re not going to sneak a scone flavoured foam in anywhere are you?”
“No.”
“Because if I find a foam anywhere…”
“There won’t be foam anywhere.”
“I’m going to keep them under the mattress just in case.”
“Fine, just keep them on your side.”

In retrospect of our conversation, I realise that asking Anthony to relinquish his spumo guns is not dissimilar to asking a child to give up their teddy bear on the argument that they are too old for it. It slowly dawns that if I hadn’t unwittingly offered, the spumo guns would have been lovingly hidden away from me under his side of the bed.
Regardless of my prejudice, it was wrong of me to criticise his ‘spumo’ years, Anthony has worked in many of the best / ponciest restaurants in the land and his expertise in molecular gastronomy would allow him to turn the contents of our new bath into a microscopically perfect canapé suitable for a royal reception. I’m only glad I got to the bath first.
I personally despise the idea of my dinner being manipulated by gangs of nerdy chefs with water-baths, a hundred plastic boil-bags and ‘meat glue’ at their disposal.
But of course I am generally, critically alone in this opinion, after all, the award of the Michelin star is entirely based on the price a restaurant is able to charge a customer for savory foams, meat gels and smears of vegetable paste. Two stars is an indication how many dozen waiting staff manage to attend your table without smiling or making eye contact, and three stars is reserved for those restaurants which achieve a certain gross weight of silver cutlery on the table, which I usually consider doing myself a mischief with by the fifth course.
The recession thankfully seems to have put a dampener on the Frankendine experience and the absolute, furthest end of the culinary spectrum is coming into fashion.
Now we want food as unrefined as physically possible; kill an animal, slap it on a plate. We want to see the cow enjoying itself in the green grass before we eat it in a bun, we want the farmers to follow the chickens around their extensive field asking at regular intervals if he can get them anything at all.
You will know if the restaurant you are in is trendy because the waiter will bring out a carcass and let you point at the bit you fancy before it very shortly arrives at your table with a side of nothing at all. Look around you, the clientele will mostly be couples ignoring each other and vastly fashionable parents trying to persuade their offspring to eat their meals.

“Eat up your pig’s face Issac.”
“Is it really the face of a pig?”
“Mmm, yes it’s yummy.”
“It’s looking at me.”
“No it’s not, it’s dead and it’s very nice and expensive, so eat up… and stop crying, or you won’t get afters”
“Can I have icecream?”
“No, you’re having a slab of Lancashire cheese and stop making a fuss, the Warrington-Smythe’s children eat sheep’s testicles.”

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