It Don’t Mean a
Thing if you Ain’t got that Ping
I bring you news that will veritably make the world shake on its very
axis: I had a perfectly palatable meal last night from the Rhareli Peking. Yes, I repeat I had a perfectly palatable meal last night from the Rhareli Peking. You might want to sit down and loosen your
collar and have a nip of something strong and have a minute to yourself so that
this inconceivable revelation can sink in.
I don’t know what was going on but when I stumbled in the Peking the
staff seemed to be having some kind of hush hush conference but on sight of me
Mr Ping, the chef, and the two delivery drivers, Thing One and Thing Two dashed
into the kitchen out the back leaving just the Baby Faced Assassin to attend to
me with his usual Oriental charm and inane grin.
Instead of simply blurting out the first dish that came into my woozy
mind I took the trouble to studiously inspect the menu in great detail, like an
optimistic punter examining the race card in immense anticipation before the
1,000 Guineas at Newmarket. I hazarded
across a dish that I used to regularly buy from the Marvil House Chinese
takeaway twenty five odd years ago when I used to work at Patrick Motors petrol
station: chicken fried rice and curry sauce.
With the grease coated clock ticking perilously close to the closing
time of midnight, at long last I was about to reveal my order to the Assassin.
But suddenly I realised that the last time I had a meat stuff that purported to
be chicken from the Peking it appeared to be the flesh from a creature
previously hitherto unknown to mankind, or as Doctor Spock might have said to
Captain Kirk in Star Trek, “It’s
chicken Jim but not as we know it.”
Considering beef to be the safe option I duly ordered beef fried rice
and curry sauce.
Next, the old routine. The
Assassin relayed the order to Mr Ping who cranked up the microwave before
playing a BBC soundtrack entitled Man
Cooking in a Chinese Takeaway in order that I get the benefit of frying in
a wok type noises for authenticity. On
occasion Thing One and/ or Thing Two will even bang pots with a wooden spoon to
enhance the masquerade and to drown out the noise of the ping when the
microwave stops cooking. Since my last visit Mr Ping must have upgraded his
microwave to a more powerful model as the meal was presented to me in the
obligatory white plastic bag by the beaming Assassin only two minutes after I
had settled down to read The Halesowen
News and before I had chance to turn to the court adjudications. The speed of service in the Peking is only
surpassed by the staff of the wonderful Mr Gregg at one his bakeries.
These days if you see
a person walking the streets carrying a little plastic bag it could contain one
of two things: take away food stuffs or dog poo. I just hope that dog walkers who stroll down
their local take away with Bowser do not get the two bags confused when serving
dinner.
On return to Codger Mansions I took the food containers out of the white
bag with the same heady mixture of excitement and fear that the intrepid Howard
Carter and George Herbert must have experienced in 1922 before they entered the
enchanted tomb of Tutankhamun. To my
astonishment and delight the removal of the lids from the two steaming pots
revealed what looked like and smelled like a perfectly plausible and edible
Chinese meal. Additionally, the curry
sauce was fluid and of a different consistency to the version Mr Ping uses for
his beef curry in which you could stand a spoon on end and it would remain
unflinchingly immovable. The sauce at
hand poured nicely onto the meal as opposed to falling out of the pot in one
gelatinous, fatty lump. The whole
experience was only two fathoms short of a miracle.
So the meal from the Peking for once wasn’t pants and on the subject of
underwear I am glad to report that I have at long last found my missing
favourite blue boxer shorts (see Lowlife 39)
and I simply could not believe where I discovered them; in my underwear drawer
of all places. They were cunningly
intertwined with a pair of decrepit boxer shorts that I never wear, discarded
at the back of the drawer, abandoned and unloved like a retired and punch drunk
boxer. I also found the Dead Sea
Scrolls, Shergar and Lord Lucan at the back of the drawer but unfortunately I
could not find my sanity or the Pirate’s sobriety.
With Kenteke being in
Minorca Halloween last week was not exactly top of my agenda and my first
instinct was to pop up the Flagon & Gorses as there are plenty of zombies
and spectres up there. Going straight to
the pub from work would have been a good idea as it would have given me enough
time for the trick and treat calls to die off.
I would have had nothing to give the little blighters anyway unless they
had wanted a nip of Aldi Vodka. But
from somewhere I had a bolt of enthusiasm and not only did I purchase the
fitting Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
to read on the night but I even wrote a poem (On Halloween Night) to recite to Kenteke over the telephone and to
inflict on the trick or treaters who dared knock on the door of Codger
Mansions. I purchased sweets to hand out
to the kiddies In order to obviate complaints from irate parents that I had
given their children Aldi Vodka (instead of a better brand like Smirnoff). I did ask calling infants what they would do
if I requested a trick instead of a treat and I was met with blank expressions
and a deafening silence on every occasion, which was also their exact response
to my poem. I didn’t tell the kids as
much, as parents these days have the annoying habit of accompanying their
charges and standing in earshot of them, but I wanted to suggest that any
tricks they planned to have in their armoury should most certainly include the
70’s schoolboy’s principal weapon of dog sh*t.
Luckily the phantasm
from my reoccurring nightmare (see Lowlife
42) didn’t pay me a visit at Halloween to turn me into a pumpkin but I did
receive unexpectedly educational correspondence from Toby In-Tents on the
subject. Toby explained that
nightmares of this type are classified under the generic term sleep paralysis
and that such experiences are relatively common. The feeling of being asleep but being
physically oppressed and not being able to move was in folklore believed to be
a demon or incubus (for women) or a succubus (for men) and there have been many
representations of this in art such as Le Cauchemar (The Nightmare)
by Eugène Thivier (1894) and the Nightmare by Henry Fuseli (1781). The incubus or succubus is a demon who, according to a number of mythological
and legendary traditions, lies upon sleepers, in order to have sex with them
and possibly to have a child, as in the legend of Merlin the Wizard. Knowing my luck I will not have a randy succubus
in my nightmare but it will be more on the Wizard theme and most likely involve
Roy Wood. And for the record I do not
wish it would be Christmas every day.
As ever, Christmas has
arrived prematurely in Birmingham City Centre and a large Christmas tree
appeared in Snow Hill Square on Monday despite us not even having seen the back
of the curious tradition of Guy Fawkes Night.
I was heartened to see that the recent strong breezes had by Tuesday
blown the tree down almost as if Zephyrus, the Greek God of the west wind, was
displaying his anger at the tree being installed such a long time before Christmas. I would wager that all Harry Burrows, a nine
year old schoolboy from Halesowen, desires for Christmas is a new vacuum
cleaner as a short article in Monday’s The
Sun (unearthed by Lowlife’s
London correspondent Barty Hook in a greasy spoon in Tooting) explained that he
has collected some forty examples of the appliance. Young Harry is simply a sucker for vacuum
cleaners.
Collecting is an odd
and strangely English phenomenon that I have never quite understood. Like the legendary music producer Phil
Spector my dear friend Alexander Sutcliffe is a collector of decommissioned
guns and it is no coincidence that both men are as mad as March hares. I have
never quite understood the attraction collecting as the only things that I seem
to collect are a string of minor disasters and failures. Most of the time I struggle to even collect
my thoughts. Now that I have made a
tenuous peace with the Baby Faced Assassin at the Rhareli Peking Chinese take
away all I want for Christmas is beef fried rice and curry sauce (and maybe a
wonton soup for starter) as in the words of the song, it don’t mean a thing if
you ain’t got that ping.
© Dominic Horton, November 2013.
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