1st Gent: Was Jesus with the fishes five thousand?
2nd Gent: No, fifty.
Such were the words of two men in front of me in the queue at Feeding the 5000 yesterday: an event in Trafalgar Square to "highlight the ease of cutting the unimaginable levels of food waste in the the UK and internationally". The men went on to discuss national bankruptcy, Gordon Brown and those bastard Scots with their subsidised whisky.
The message of this event was clear: all of you with your fresh fruit and vegetables – you posers – you never eat it, you don't even like it, you just let it go soft and then throw it out, yous ought to stick to Mars Bars and the smaller sized baked bean tins – that way you won't be so fucking wasteful. I'm paraphrasing here – there may have been something about supermarkets as well.
Their plan was to feed five thousand or so people with food that would otherwise have been discarded. Naturally, there was a long queue and the organisers had been instructed by London authorities that the queue should not extend beyond a certain point so as not to impede the free flow of pedestrian traffic across the square. In deference to this instruction, a battalion of stewards had been hired to corral the queuers. Their leader was equipped with a megaphone and she moved up and down the queue, shouting at it, telling it to bunch up. In addition, it was snowing and there was a stiff breeze. The experience of queueing was thus something like being in a jolly Gulag.
The free food was very good: bread, fruit, a smoothie, a vegetable curry and an onion bhaji. The curry was tasty and nicely spiced: how had they got hold of such a quantity discarded spices? I'm sure supermarkets throw away perfectly fresh spices all the time but this must be almost nothing compared to the quantities of fruit and vegetables that they throw away. It's one thing to stew vegetables for the five thousand but quite another to spice the five thousand. Clever them.
Upon leaving I was distracted by this zombie bear.
It turned out to be a snare and I found myself fallen among operatives of the World Wide Fund for Nature. They had me on all sides and immediately I was set about by their representative Bex to whom I surrendered my contact details so that they could telephone in the coming days to arrange the payment of my ransom.
The task was plainly a very simple one. I was aware, however, of a few things to be borne in mind: these items must be light and small as I will have to carry them in my luggage on the train; also, it would not do to spend all afternoon shopping for them – the Christmas spirit is not kindled by shopping for yourself. Beyond that, clearly I am well placed to know what I like so it should be easy.
So it was that, not three hours later, my attention was drawn to a cast-iron griddle pan. A few more hours carrying it all over town revealed that it really was of singularly robust construction – a welcome addition to my kitchen equipment. Having assembled a handful of other suitable trinkets, I was able to return home, griddle-panning London shoppers and commuters about the shins as I went.
