As Napoleon will tell you, no force can expect to do anything properly on an empty stomach. This post is not a rule as such, it’s more an adjunct to Rule Twenty-nine and a reminder. You need to put some meat on your bones. Don’t forget to roll your eyes and suck your teeth when administering the following advice to someone else.
You can eat anything, because, when confronting your enemies you need a full stomach. But remember:
Eating too many pies until you have to go to hospital because you don’t eat anything else, is rum. You can tell others about this misfortune (because it wasn’t you) with an easy laugh, but then you flutter your eyes and say, with an intake of breath, “he was never the same again”. Even if you do, also, say tell the assembled company the pie eater called everyone “Little Master” and was considered very good crack. (Thirty years later this story finds an echo with a friend and pot noodles, “had to go to the RVI and get pumped,” or so he said. This doesn’t stop you getting misshapes out the back door of the factory on a midweek, when you’re home and skint. Some look like bananas and others look like mills bombs but they have a crust and a filling.)
Eating the whole colander-sized bowl full of coleslaw at a party for the paper you work on, is because you are lonely.
Eating all the chicken wings at a birthday party in Bold St Working Men’s Club, Accrington, is because you are drunk, and lonely.
Stealing gentleman's relish from the posh supermarket in the Trough of Bowland, is because you are lonely.
Going for a walk up towards Marl Hill on the Slaidburn Road before you eat four pork sausages when you come back as a treat, is because you are lonely and living out some idiot fantasy of the countryside. Only the Yellowhammer says hello.
Having to insist on Tricketts ice cream, regardless of what others say, because, when you were a little girl, it was a huge treat to get out of Clayton and to go to Dunshop Bridge on a ride out on the bus and eat it! The following fifty years bear witness to the fact that this is the only place you will buy, or eat ice cream (Tricketts, vanilla, full cream). Apart from, sometimes, the stone cottage that has a window-sized serving hatch in a stone wall, on the hill at Mitton. Old church, that. The scene of BLOODSHED.
Mrs Lambert has the best tripe and puds, been there since your mother was little so they must be good.
Don’t throw frozen mince into a pan of hot oil.
Don’t drink the water out of the whelk jar. That’s for folk who think they’re funny but are just sad and lonely, and showing off.
Don’t use a bayonet to defrost your freezer otherwise all the grub you’ve saved for marching on your stomach will have to go down in one sitting.
Remember, only two chocolate fingers from the plate, because your Auntie Grace has SHARP EYES and doesn’t want mucky fingers on her settee. If there are mucky fingers she won’t put the radiogram on.
You can’t go to Baxenden to play with your school pals because they just feed you those new oven chips, not healthy.
No sprouts, they give your mother wind. And parboiling them is too modern for her.
A bit mince.
A bit beetroot.
A bit herring done in a pan with breadcrumbs.
A kipper cooked in milk. Saturday treat.
A bit tin of salmon with pepper. All there for a man.
Remember again: what’s all there for a man, them tins of soup you won at the raffle. Irish stew, lentil stew with onions, all there for a man.
Gutting a camel over a pit and then setting it alight was the worst thing you’d ever seen, you had to eat it because the local tribesmen were pals, you liked them. But bloody hell you and your mob were thankful for hard tack after!
A snake tastes of nowt, even when you roast it over a fire.
Learning to cook, because you are going to be lonely. You have to, now, so make some cooking notes about the basics in a small hand-sized notebook and carry it around, to memorise how you do onions and tomatoes in a pan. The base of all good meals, says one of your sons. He means well.
Abnormally developing the muscles around your thumb and in your thenar region is thanks to the amount of trays full of pies you lift out of the oven. Talking of that, did they really chop someone up and put them through the mincer? You can believe the stories about dogs, though. Talking of that, an old school pal chopped someone up, some years back.
Looking at whale meat in a shop window. Dark, looked like a lung, your grandad said. A year later he was dead.
An accompanying post to this Rule, with relevant illustrations, can be found in the Museum of Photocopies.