Eat

A big pot of noodles swimming around with balls of pork, little testicles of meat entwined in slippery tentacles. I felt like the victim of a gold digger.

Some fluorescent veg and salad is having a peak at the shoreline, but it’s really not for mixing. There’s a party in there and it’s invite only.

I prod with two short chop sticks and can’t help noticing that such a fluid dinner surely requires more than two sticks for consumption. Asian food is just not cut out for chop sticks. British food, sausages and steak, big hunks of meat, yeah sure, the sticks would be fine. But slippery strands of rice and cumbersome balls of meat prove more elusive than Jordan’s integrity.

I had asked for spicy, and I got a moderate burn but we’re not talking super hot here. On the scale of hotness we were definitely at the Babestation girls level, the gap-eyed hanging mouth bunch who were liberated from the local park by a sleazy agent in a secondhand BMW who told them they would be famous if they put down the white lightning amd sucked his cock. Hot is was not.

But tasty it was, in a sort of unfamiliar way. It was a stumble into a new beginning and trying to find your bearings but quite enjoying the disorientation. It’s the feeling when you learn to drive and you realise that you could drive where you wanted when you wanted and the weight of possibility crushed your consciousness so much you had your first crash. (I will take this moment to apologise to the person who’s wing mirror I took off with my wing mirror. And I apologise for driving off quickly.)

I finished it and dabbed my mouth. Vietnam. I have eaten you. And I didn’t mind it.

For me, that is a high compliment.