This doesn’t look promising. My friend, A, has invited me
around to try her ‘cooking’ (her quotations) and there’s something about the
way she hacks at a red onion with a paring knife in the near incidental light
of the downlighters in her kitchen, that does not suggest she does this all
that often. It’s only now that I notice that her kitchen is suspiciously clean.
She heats some oil in a pan and adds the onion, chopped mushrooms, some spinach
leaves and halved cherry tomatoes, before pouring over a jar of bolognaise
sauce and stirring. She then adds Quorn meatballs from the freezer. I must have
wrinkled my nose at this point as she feels the need to reassure me and top up
my wine glass. When she serves it up with spaghetti, I have to say that I’m
pleasantly surprised, it’s actually very eatable and I’ve had a couple of
vegetables that don’t often pass my lips: Spinach and cherry tomatoes. We
follow it with Belgian chocolate cheesecake.
We talk and have a laugh about numerous things, before the
subject turns to Haggis and I tell the story of how my sister thought for a few
years that a haggis was an animal of some kind. How ridiculous! What a sucker!
However the sombre features of my dining partner indicate she, until that very
second, had thought the same. I ask her to describe and she mimes in her two
hands holding a furry guinea pig-like creature. I haven’t known her that long
and this is definitely an awkward moment. Later in the evening I manage to achieve
some kind of embarrassment equilibrium by telling her my still unsubstantiated
theory on milk on tap in pubs. We make a pact not to tell the other’s secret.
