This week the sweet, lispy trainee began his till tenure at the pointy end of my local Panda Mart, and I was his first customer. I was buying four chocolate-coated ice creams on sticks.
You know how you’re compelled to tell your hairdresser or the taxi guy all sorts of shit that isn’t remotely true (I can do krav maga), or is so shamefully true (I like a Justin Bieber song, but only that one with Usher, but not Usher per se), but either way you just don’t understand why it’s coming out of your mouth? So I was burbling away and I told the lad the ice creams were for me and the Hubster.
It was a big fat lie. The plan all along was to scoff them unaided, in toto, the moment I got behind closed doors. Because calcium – obviously – to stop me breaking a hip and never getting out of that assisted living facility alive, but mainly ‘cos I’m a sulky no-mates in the afternoons since PPCTV lost FoxCrime and replaced Bobby Goren with DIVA. Which is ok when SVU is on because who doesn’t love Mariska Hargitay, but most of the time there are just those god-awful Telemundo soaps with dire American overdubbing.
But anyway. The lad was chirpy and a bit ditzy and camp as a row of tents. All of which was mildly entertaining, except that he called me mama throughout my perfidious babble.
“Hello mama. What’s your name mama?” like he’d learned English from Kanye. Not Madame, or Sister, Bong Srey or even Sir – all of which I’ll answer to. Mama caught me off guard. Oh happy days. Someone else who mistakenly thinks I’m up the duff and not biblically obese. Eat your heart out Eglon the Moab.
Like a camel I have three stomachs, unless you count the pouch under my chin, which is kind of a holding bay in case there’s a buffet. If you’ve seen me standing in profile, you’ll know the way to my heart is through them. So not counting my mandibular scoff pocket there’s my top tummy, which sits just above my big middle paunch, that cantilevers over the cheeky underhang that no amount of that hot Floyd Mayweather’s ringside ab workout’s gonna fix. I got this way from eating a fair bit over quite some time and not really exercising unless you count going down the shop and then back up two flights of stairs carrying approximately 300 grams of ice cream.
I haven’t inflated this pneumatic physique on normal snacks alone. As a guest in CharmingVille and the wife of a bloke who fries a mean bat, I’ve given the weirder items on the dark menu a red hot go. On our first date The Hubster squired me to a hammock restaurant and we spent a pleasant afternoon miscommunicating and feasting on Coca-Cola chicken washed down with warm Heineken. It wasn’t bad at all.
Even Bayon is importing weird foods that only people who do yoga can pronounce. So today I made something called a quinoa and chia seed milk smoothie. I put in some comfortingly familiar banana and was just sitting down to feel self-righteous and watch some goats jumping on a bit of tin on YouTube when I received a disturbing Viber photo from my Life Partner, who was lurking down the local man-cave so he wouldn’t have to taste any of my internet recipe experiments.
Without my glasses I thought it was a close-up of some baby pandas being born. Icky but maybe cute later. It was definitely black and white but, specs on, turned out to be a big fat mess of wetly bloated larvae – plus a peppering of black nippers and a very distinct waspy carapace. Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve chowed down in a Koh Dach jungalow on red ants and the tiniest piece of roast rat. I’ve picked spider legs out me choppers with a cricket stick at Skun and supped on barbied snake in the privacy of my own home. I’ll even inhale a durian at the drop of a hat. So there are a lot of disgusting things I’ve done in my life – quite a few have to do with food – but you won’t see my mouthparts anywhere near duck webs, eggs with flyblown embryos inside them, puppies, and centipedes in rice wine. And I draw the line at hornet larvae now too.
When news went round our neighbourhood petanque league on the tuk tuk grapevine that killer drones had set up shop in a mango tree behind the museum, every man and his bruv hustled round there with sticks, smoke and a point of view on how to cook ‘em just right. Just the thought of it had me mentally wind-milling away and grabbing my metaphorical EpiPen. As soon as I clapped eyes on Hubster’s stir-fry of death my throat closed over. But someone else told me they’re not so bad. Not at all just like chicken, but worth a go, even if you’re not a Gryllsian prepper or a precocious teen chef looking for wanky new restaurant ideas, or one of the 6 billion entomophages the rest of us gutless wonders share a planet with. And after all I guess honey is just bee vomit.