Fruit de Nightmare

I took my life in my hands this morning when I nipped into Pat Maggs’s café for me breakfast. She begged me to try her latest invention the ‘Ocean Churn Bap’, and with the menopause in full flight, the lady is not to be trifled with. Words can barely describe the experience of that first bite. Under the stern gaze of Pat Maggs, whose henna’d hair and wildly misguided make-up are making her look like a cross between Rita Fairclough and Heath Ledger’s ‘Joker’, I chomped my way through everything the sea has to offer and the fishmonger rightly rejects. Rank crustacean carcasses and pods of foul smelling, viscous liquids were mashed together in my gob. My brain refused to let any of this matter down towards my stomach, so there it remained in my mouth, being hurled around and around like some hideous, medieval Tombola. As you know I’m a trained actor with years of experience disguising my own feelings, but even I could not disguise the sheer dread at having to swallow this crime against gastronomy. I was sweating profusely, I could feel myself growing green and I was retching hard at the mere prospect of forcing it down. I absolutely had to vomit. And Pat’s feelings were not my main concern as I did so all down her ‘Be nice to me I’m having a hard day’ apron. I caught a glimpse of her as I stumbled towards the door like a child in a play pen; the ageing photos on the café wall suggest she was a stunner in her day. How I wanted to cry.