Menuvator's Corner

Probably the main problem with life being an utterly pointless pursuit, like eating soup with chopsticks - sprinkling a room with sage in order to catch a snake, or trying to explain away the localised escalation of the murder rates of Wiltshire villages to super-Colombian levels in Midsummer Murders - is that you need to qualify it somehow. Many people do this through their jobs. For those of us magnificently lucky enough to take day-to-day survival for granted by living in a country such as Britain, there is a general consensus that you can have a moderate chance of being happy if you can find a job you like and which is fulfilling. A fulfilling job is defined as being attained once you find the niche of work that you detest the least and then kow-tow to every sordid whim of your employer (or in the case of the self-employed, your clients) until you either reach the ripe old age of fifty when you then die painfully with stress-induced boils on your face, or reach the even riper and positively mouldy age of 65 and get handed a cheque that might get you some economy baked beans and enough gin to numb your mind long enough to aim that crossbow at your own eye while standing on the parapet of a suspension bridge.

My own record on this attainment of finding a fulfilling and non-wrist-cutting job is woefully poor. Indeed a fairly hefty barricade to gaining a fulfilling job can be done without any outside intervention. Not knowing what you want to do yourself practically condemns you to one miserable job after another, and then your only hope is trying to shoehorn some semblance of a meaningful life into the remaining hours of time that remain outside work. A little like filling cracks in a wall with polyfill, but with a demonstrably lesser chance of success. That said, there is one last tactic that can at least slightly increase the probability of attaining happiness, or if not, at least stave you off that tempting-sounding newspaper clipping advertisement:

“Mortapill Corporation is looking for Experienced Smallpox Testers.
Salary: £5.52 per hour before death, rising to £11.75 after, plus bonuses and company car.
Duties: A keen advocate of alternative technologies, enthusiastic and intelligent, you will have considerable experience of catching near-fatal illnesses, and of wheezing in a generally theatrical and playful manner. A keen team-worker, your responsibilities will include drinking vial after vial of deadly smallpox, while effusing the buoyant and youth-grabbing qualities of the firm. We aim to foster a friendly environment for our staff, and have a competitiveness life insurance scheme.”

Cathartic as it sounds, it may not be the way forward. Instead, pick one thing that you enjoy, and try and tease a job out of it, much as you would tease out a flesh-eating maggot with a flame. Of course, that is to completely forget about the fact that you need skills – as Gordon Brown said approximately 60 times in a five minute television interview last night – and probably talent. My own situation involving several failed attempts at growing into a job, or attaining the necessary skills to find an enjoyable one, together with a final dismal settlement with no conceivable way out, for now, has meant some desperate thinking. The one thing I know I can stomach (excuse the upcoming pun) with any certainty is food. Cooking is not an option due to the complexity, skill, common-sense and judgement involved, and this therefore leaves two remainders – food-tasting or becoming a restaurant critic.

The first option at first seems appealing. The type of people who need food-tasters generally have a beautiful diet, rich in all the giddy nutrients that Earth can hold, and sumptuous to the extreme. The downside is unfortunately rather similar to that of the smallpox-tester. Which leaves the ‘becoming a restaurant critic’ option. And here, just for you, is my first review.

Alabama Fried Chicken, Springburn, Glasgow.

Situated in a rather unlikely position, far from the boutiques, cafes and Italian fayre of the Merchant City, this northern vestige of the city nevertheless does have the distinction of containing this delightful-looking rural United States-themed restaurant. Indeed with many pretenders aiming to leap to the heady pedestal of gastronomic perfection in this genre, it seems the perfect time to investigate exactly which treats were on offer to the discerning gentleman and his lady friend.

My esteemed guest, Lady Henrietta of Balerno, and I, did survey the outside scene with intrepidation. It seemed a far way from the good-quality fried mystique, dusty houses, broken windmills and rustic scenes of lynchings that the name of the place evoked. We were treated to an uncommon vista of tower blocks and a positively frightful dual-carriageway which seemed to take the discerning tinge off my fine-tuned palette in a way which had been foreign to me since that over-spiced filet de mignon in the Café Montmartre back in ’66. I am afraid to say that my goodly friend almost swooned as a result, but a delicate shot of snuff to her aristocratic nostrils as we traversed the ‘Drive Thru’, as the proles are want to call it, was enough to bring her round.

We entered an atmosphere of slight disarray, but which nevertheless gave the impression of a generous and pulsating vitality to the scene. The décor was of a gloriously simple design, adorned with black and white photographs of children holding coloured pieces of chicken. This was a beautiful touch which lent itself somewhat to the post-structuralist discourse of Freud while infusing his stringent prose with the playful abandonism of Andy Warhol slap-dashing colour prints on a tiled wall while sucking the gravelled voice of Lou Reed through his tobacco-forested pipe. One could imagine the musty southern air, the rising scent of the majestic Mississippi river as immortalised so vividly through childish eyes by Mark Twain, and the authentic sound of tills beeping and adolescents shouting above screaming, pissing children.

If the atmosphere did evoke the swamps and passion of the South, the service unfortunately did not. Lady Henrietta and I assumed our positions by the waiters’ pedestal to be seated, only to notice with disgust that said proles were emptying trays of festering bones into them in front of our eyes. I did my best to shield my lady’s eyes from the cruel sight with her veil, only to illicit a not-entirely-justified slap, which stung much like a honeybee upon the knee while swinging innocently from a bough in the height of a gruelling summer. In time, we found our own way to the tables, which were of a quality that I have not seen since my days as an ambassador in the Levant. Another interminable wait followed, whereupon I seized my Lady roughly by the arm, as masculine etiquette dictates and we reluctantly joined the multiple queues ahead. The floor was sticky and slightly soiled to the touch, but it did add an air of authenticity in its greasy feel.

In my mind, I had summoned up ravenous images of raspberry tartlets, drizzled balsamic vinegar, croutons tender to the touch, steaks suffused with ecstatic juices and Southern spices and the radiant taste of wine. I inquired about the house wine but was met with looks that bordered on shock. My dearest Lady Henrietta noticed that there was an option involving a bucket, and a serving-wench was duly dispatched to fetch the item, such was our unabated curiosity. We seized the bucket, and with child-like haste and joy ran back to the table and succumbed to our hunger with beast-like instinct. The joys at this simplistic food cannot be overstated. The skin of the chicken, moist to the touch, leaking a bountiful burst of oil at the slightest depression, soaked into the tongue and slipped easily down the throat like a scant-seasoned oyster on a moonlit night in Seville. The teasing way in which the skin separates from the flesh of the chicken is most pleasing to the eye, and Lady Henrietta found a renewed enthusiasm in discovering the explosive mix of flavours that could be reached by wrapping a chip in the greasy skin, and devouring it whole. A side order of barbecue sauce, for which we were grateful not to be charged, made us almost reach a gustatory climax of pleasure. For a brief moment, I felt almost as if an apparition of the South had appeared before me, as though I were making my way steadily westwards through the scrub as a wild-eyed pilgrim, my wood-carved belongings and sixteen children behind me, my trusty steeds afore, and my trusting Lady to my side. I lost myself in the moment, emitting a “Yee Hah!”, while my Lady Henrietta fell into a joy-induced coma and lay spreadeagled on the floor while small youths clad in athletic gear and waving knives as though partaking in a beautiful pagan ritual danced about her sprawled figure.

The bucket duly finished, I asked once again for a wine list, but noted rather disappointedly that only carbonated soft drinks were on offer. The strangely diluted version of House Coke was pleasing to the gut, and it layered itself with the oil in my stomach in a tumultuous but strangely alluring way. In the majestic simplicity of their offerings, they had indeed allowed me and my joy-maddened Lady to reach a short-aired peak of the senses, rivalling a tearful sunset on the Indian plains as viewed from a moving train wagon or the sheer beauty in innocence of a teen gang scrumping for apples and gently breaking the ribs of the prostrate–lying orchard-owner with their boots, as he looks on in awe and with the honour of the ages flickering in his slowly diminishing eyes.

I left the restaurant with a renewed spring in my step and a zest for life. Even without my Lady Henrietta of Balerno by my side - she was last seen boarding a cargo plane bound for Sudan - I still feel only gratitude for the direction that the simple grub of Alabama Fried Chicken has given me.

Next week: The Shettleston Cuban-themed restaurant Fidel Gastro gets the going over by Kiran and his new companion Lord Tarquin of the Antipodes. AA Gill is having his stomached pumped after he was accidentally served an eel filled with semen at a chip shop in Solihull.