Crispy Business
I travelled back in time last Friday.
No, not to last Friday. That would have been a bit pointless, going back in time all of three days … unless I’d done something utterly catastrophic on Friday, like running over the boffin hurrying to announce the cure for the common cold, which he’d not written down or told anyone because of incessant delusions that everyone else in the lab was out to get him, delusions brought about by an untreated blow to the head in his teenage years and not at all helped by the fact that Alan in Haematology kept nicking his yoghurt out of the canteen fridge, the smug fucking prick.
It’s my greatest fear that I’ll do something like that – like, that I’ll unintentionally set in motion something with horrendous consequences for the world, not that I’ll steal someone’s Yop. I fucking hate Yop.
Anyway, time travel.
I was down in West Cork at the wedding of my dear friend Lettuce, who is so dear to me that she doesn’t mind being nicknamed for a salad vegetable. We stayed in a West Cork hotel, as is the custom, and walking into the bedroom was like walking into the nineteen seventies, complete with ugly panelling and the remnants of one of them olive green bathroom suites. It was most evocative, especially considering I wasn’t alive in the nineteen seventies.
Evocative, but endearing. How we giggled at the sagging beds, the split-ends carpet, the perplexing Perspex overlapping the top of the dressing table! We giggled all the way through the Beef Or Salmon. We giggled as we quaffed that new-fangled pear cider. We even giggled through the wedding band’s forty-five minute-long rendition of The Siege Of Ennis. The giggles subsided, though, when we noticed the poor selection of vegetarian sandwiches at the Afters. Easi-Singles on white bread has long been my kryptonite.
“I think I need a packet of crisps,” I sniffed, dissecting the sandwich as one would the corpse of a slurry pit suicide – with scalded tongs and an expression veering well away from Your-Poor-Mother.
But there were no crisps. None. Not Taytos, Kings, nor Hunky Dorys. Not even damp little Walkers, the crisp that’s always late to the party because no one fucking cares whether it’s there or not. None. Not so much as a half-eaten packet of Burger Bites they found covered in jam in the playroom. No peanuts, even.
“There’s this Kit-Kat?” the barman chanced.
But when you’ve been lushing the fuck out of it since 3pm, there’s no Kit-Kat in the world that will sate your salty hankerings. And in all fairness, what’s in a Kit-Kat that’s going to whither you up for more alcohol? I thought every barman worth his you-know-what understood that the more the customer’s tongue is shrivelled by the snacks available when the tummy’s rumbling good-oh, the heavier the till will be by the end of the night. Surely that was a philosophy back in the days of bubble perms and Fawlty Towers? Surely?
I can take dial-radios set into the wall. I can take industrial Armitage Shanks bog roll holders in the loo. I am fine with single-glazed windows and free-shampoo-free showers. But for fuck’s sake, there’s no nostalgia, escapism, or Mother Superior in the world that would make me go back to an Irish hotel which doesn’t sell Taytos. If you can’t even get the simple things right, what hope is there? And what’s the point in hallucinatory jaunts into the past when they don’t serve the appropriate culinary comforts? Tayto was launched in 1954. 1954!!!
Hmm.
I’ve really got to stop blogging about crisps.
Tayto sucks.
King for the win.
Nice new home by the way.
I have no idea where you went, but I’m just glad you’re back.
No self-respecting barman on either side of the pond would not have salty snacks. WTF is that? Flog him. Just take him out back and beat the shit out of him, that’s what I say. Gives us good barfolk a bad name.
holy moley, sugar! xoxoxo
Life is rough without crisps. I’m giving them up though, as my hips are rougher with them.
Yay! This totally made my day. Good to see you back on the interwebs.
D’you remember Pub Crisps? Aahh! now thatn was marketing for you!! Nice new gaff!
Shit I forgot to tell you about the emergency box in the boot…
Site looks fab by the way.
Luck to yiz all.
Tayto the king of crisps!
The mind boggles! No crisps in an Irish Pub! Dear God! Maybe he was finding it entertaining looking at the pain and anguish on your poor face! Those Cork people have a sick sense of humour ya know!
Love this new shindig, yooz lot.
Yooz, though with your wealth of crisp types, your embarrassment of numptious crisp varieties, have no idea what it’s like to live in a land barren of their deep-fried ambrosial finger-lickingness. I would take the life of someone I quite liked for a packet of Walkers some of these early early mornings. Yip, I said Walkers, lady! They beat Taytos into crisp-dust in head to head combat.
I am soo glad I turned that job in Kinsale down now, I don’t believe you about the avocado bathroom though.
Walkers still win by the way.
Clean; on topic; no spam. Did I forget something? What a huge improvement to now go to one spot to ignore three quarters of the posts and read one every fourth day. To quote Ron Weasley: “Brilliant!”
Being stuck in a 3rd world cuntrie much like Ireland I had to rely on one Brit food shop and they carried Walkers, each packet costing $500 of course. I recently went further a field to a different Brit shop but not to a field and got some Tayto which was the only remotely Norn ironish food they had. Tayto beats Walkers but Golden Wonder is better.
Yes I did get Jaffa cakes, got a problem with that?
Best of luck Sweary with the new site. Looks mega. I caught Flan from you intro on your other place and was immediately hooked and Manuel is the dogs anyway. I hate those broken bed places. Easi singles are what we feed sick people in our house. We slip them under the door.
I was so excited about being in a new home that I completely forgot to reply to any of my comments.
Please forgive me. I promise I can change when given the right motivation, i.e. bribes.
If we’d had Tayto in the land of the Scots I’d predict we’d be a happier people, no bigotry would ruin our soggy dispostions and we’d probably be independant by now.
Tayto is the right of the free and death to all who fail to stock it’s cheesy wonderment.
Just the cheese ones mind. The other flavours are crap.