Saturday 15 January 2011

On loving meat so much it hurts

My girlfriend made meat loaf the other day. It's delicious. So delicious that I ate it a bit too aggressively and chomped a great hole in the side of my tongue with a combination of top incisor and lower molar. True to form, this wound soon developed into a giant ulcer, more vicious looking than the Sarlaac pit and more painful than it's possible to describe to anyone who has never suffered from giant tongue ulcers. Its location meant it was constantly resting against a tooth and any movement of the tongue, no matter how slight, caused immense, tear-inducing pain. This made eating, talking, and even swallowing and yawning a harrowing trial.

I'm a couple of days in and there's no respite in sight. I can't talk without looking and sounding like a drooling stroke victim, and I can't eat anything without looking like a bird trying to chug back a whole fish.

Wednesday 5 January 2011

On looking a bit murdery

On the way home tonight I picked up a couple of bottles of red wine for myself - nothing unusual there, except tonight I decided to treat myself to something a little more expensive than what I usually drink, just to see if it's worth the extra few Euro (in retrospect I shouldn't have, since the tastiest, smoothest red wine I've had from a supermarket here is only €1.99, and it's delicious. Plus it has a twist top - all will be revealed as you read on...).

So, I get home, relax a little, put on some music, and decide to uncork the beast. Except I remember I don't own a corkscrew. I despair briefly and then remember I've used a certain screwdriver to uncork a bottle before, so all is not lost. I gently screw in the tip, at which point I realise that this is the most ridiculous cork ever created - it seemed to defy all laws of chemistry and physics, apparently having a core made from dust and sponge cake, but an outer surface fashioned from octopus suckers and cement. The screwdriver got no purchase, but sank through the "cork" which stuck fast to the edges of the bottle. I couldn't pull it up, so after much internal debate I decided the only way was down and in. This is where it all began to go wrong. Or wronger.

My kitchen has white walls, a white ceiling and white appliances. The wine is red - you see where this is going but allow me to continue. Using as little force as I can I gently begin to ease the cork down, except the cork, being the bastard that it is, decides to then relinquish all grip on its host and just dive in. Imagine the force with which a cork erupts from a champagne bottle but going the other way, into a load of stainy red stuff. Displacement occurs, and how. The red wine is forced out and all over every single surface in my kitchen, including I believe, some that weren't even there before and came into existence just to be coated in my scarlet foolishness. I whip off the soaked shirt I'm wearing and begin desperately scrubbing everywhere. My kitchen overlooks an abandoned parking lot but beyond that is the street, with a view directly up at me. Anyone happening to pass at that point would have seen a half-naked man, covered in red, meticulously scrubbing the walls and ceiling of ominous red stains, frantically glancing around in case he missed a spot.

The wine was average at best.