The lotus eaters

Melbourne's apparently known as Bleak City, and it's true, it's been raining incessantly all day: but today there was a little hotspot of bright colours, excitement, pop music and, most importantly, excessive consumption at Melbourne Central Mall, beneath the towering, incongruous edifice of the old lead pipe and shot factory. Yes, the CP Biggest Eater Competition was in town.

First up was a strangely innocent performance by a Chinese girl band who apparently are currently no. 1 in the Chinese pop charts.

But then came the main event. The ravening crowd were expertly whipped into a frenzy by presiding MC Sam, who with pinpoint accuracy described the contest to come as being "the battleground on which God and Lucifer wage war for the souls of men" and, realistically, as being the most democratic of contests. There were amateurs participating, but they were, frankly, amateurs; all eyes were on the professionals.

The wontons themselves looked harmless enough, and tasted pretty good:

But in a competition to eat as many as you can, all notions of these wontons as substance, or as food, must presumably be banished in order to get as many past the tonsils as possible.

All three professionals, with the eventual winner on the far right. 307 wontons down, and make-up still largely intact.

World of work

My very first job was in the town where I was born, Haddington, a short bus ride (or, given bus infrequency, a daunting cycle) from my village. I had a Saturday job in an art gallery and coffee shop called “Peter Potter's”, a job my sister had had before me, working alongside a selection of Haddington teenagers, one of whom, a Glaswegian, became my boyfriend for a while. I never met Mr Potter, and know nothing about him, but he did exist, a fact perhaps known to the local kids who used to delight in shouting into the letter box at the front door: “Peter Potter picked a snotter!”

Peter Potter's was a genteel, rather pretentious little place run by elderly ladies who seemed to enjoy playing power games. I was 14 when I started there, and was paid GBP2 an hour (even at the time, circa 1983, this was insultingly low pay, barely enough to get the bus to Edinburgh afterwards) to work in the coffee shop, serving ploughman’s lunches, baked potatoes, toasted sandwiches, coffees, teas and cakes to the good folk of Haddington  (as well as tourists getting out of the rain, and once, excitingly, Ronnie Corbett, who enjoyed a bowl of our cauliflower soup). As ambivalent as I was about working there, I’m sure I sometimes behaved ungraciously in my role as waitress, but there were only two complaints about me from four years of Saturdays: I was taken aside by one insufferable woman and told that I was “scruffy”; and I refused to serve tea to the daughter of some local knight of the realm, because she arrived, demanding to be served, when the place had closed, and I was packing up for the day and no longer on the clock. This was an early experience of imperiousness that I’ve never forgotten.

I remember wearing a particular pair of tight black cords with a broken zip which I tried to fix, ineptly, with lashings of sellotape, only to have some grinning men point out to me that my zip was down. I remember making the best toasties ever for my own lunch, stuffed with grated cheese, ham, raw onion and Branston Pickle. I remember the smell of fresh paint and wholemeal flapjacks. I remember looking out at the rain and longing for my shift to end.

I'm sure lots of things about this job have stood me in good stead: the ability to be incredibly polite (almost to the point of sarcasm, where they're not quite sure you're not being rude, but don't dare suggest it) to people who clearly think you (as a waitress, or a teenager, or a woman, or all three) are beneath them, and, as a corollary, a lifelong appreciation for waitresses; naturally, a distrust of the sort of people who run small-town art galleries; and the ability to make a damn good toasted sandwich.

Five leaves left

A banana leaf lunch at the Royal Selangor Club in KL. We began with an ice-cold lassi. The banana leaf is loaded up with savoury condiments (chopped cucumber in yogurt, mango, deep-fried chilli pods, spicy cabbage) and steamed rice ("with extra vitamin B", said our host). A choice of sauces is ladled on top of the rice - I chose curried daal and then took this picture. Then a sequence of little dishes are passed around - mutton, chicken, beef, and fish - and with the right hand, you scrape up a collection of different flavours and eat. When you're finished, the banana leaf is folded over and removed. A highly efficient way of eating and so tasty that, urged on by everyone around me, I ate much more than I was hungry for as our host and his friends talked Malaysian politics, corruption, legal gossip and compared blood sugar levels (really).

Just like honey

Chilli hot chocolate
Heat a large coffee cup by filling it with hot water. Pour out the hot water. Take two generous pieces of Lindt chilli chocolate and put them in the bottom of the cup with just enough hot water to melt them. Froth a cupful of milk. Pour hot milk into coffee cup, stirring slowly until chocolate is melted. Top with froth. Drink. Enjoy. Repeat.

Dear catastrophe waitress

In the year I finished my degree and before I went back to Glasgow to do the postgraduate Diploma in Legal Practice, I spent a miserable summer back in East Lothian. I'd split up with my boyfriend just before graduating; I didn't want to sign on; home was only the place I'd always longed to get away from and seemed cold and damp; I wasn't getting on well with my Mum; I thought I wasn't going to get a grant for my course, and so on and so self-pitying. I took a job as a waitress in Musselburgh ("The Honest Toun"), in a place called Medaci's. Near Musselburgh's one bright spot, Luca's, it was a "Mediterranean Restaurant", which was really just a big room at the back of the kebab shop which the tubby owner had fancied might make a good place for fine dining. The locals viewed it with amusement: as they waited for their kebabs they'd poke their heads through the bead curtain and mock me as I stood there waiting for customers that rarely came.

The chef was a foul-mouthed, ex-Merchant Navy chef, an ancient, wiry little man called Tommy; in the absence of any customers, I used to spend most of my time in the kitchen eating delicious spaghetti arabbiata freshly cooked by Tommy as he regaled me with his stories of shagging on the high seas and knocked back whisky. There I learned the waitress's conundrum: you don't want it to be quiet because it's mind-numbingly boring waiting for customers; but when customers do arrive, you loathe and despise them for choosing your restaurant and wish them gone with all due dispatch.

For a while there was a Greek waiter there, who used to stand uncomfortably close to me behind my little counter. The boss told me to re-heat the cold coffee from the day before to offer to customers. I couldn't work the cappuccino machine. I had to invent a banana split from scratch as I had no idea what was supposed to go into one. We had the Gypsy Kings on continuous loop. The boss's nasty little son, an equally tubby 11 year old with a lightning bolt shaved on the side of his round little head, used to sneak in behind my back into the fridge and spray canned cream from the tin straight into his mouth. Tommy became an unlikely ally; he hated the boss as much as I did and even began offering me a drink of his whisky. The summer seemed to last an eternity. At its end, I returned to Glasgow, having received a grant to do my course, and it was no surprise that Medaci's closed not long after that.

Musselburgh's being recommended by The Guardian as a place to visit to get away from the hubbub of the Edinburgh Festival. When I read that, I was instantly transported back to being paid £2.50 an hour at a failing restaurant; and I just can't see anything attractive in the idea of visiting the place. Even now, though the kebab shop is long gone too, I shoot a bad glance in its direction whenever I'm unlucky enough to pass by.

I am the egg man

This man (smouldering fag in hand) was cooking eggs at a handsome egg station in Ueno Park (home of the National Museum of Japan). He's also tossing handfuls of unappetising strips of bacon carelessly on to the cooking eggs. I am fond of eggs in all their guises but there was something about the insouciance with which he handled his egg duties, and his filthy red apron, that made for a happy egg station, although if you had any sense, the clues all being there if you cared to look for them, I don't think you'd be sampling his wares.

The best possible taste

I don't often write about food, which is surprising given how much I love it (and accordingly, I'm no sylph). For some reason I was feeling very hungry on the bus today, on the way home from work, and this made me think about the fact that actually it sometimes doesn't even matter what you're eating: the environment, the company you're keeping, the weather, the music, something unpredictable and unique or even just how stupidly hungry you are can make the following list of things, for instance, taste better than anything you've ever tasted:

a cup of tea in a plastic mug outside my just-pitched tent;
fish and chips from Joe's Fish Bar in Tranent, straight out of the packet;
a bowl of Doll instant noodles (probably chicken flavour);
fish fingers and tomato sauce, eaten with my fingers;
cold baked beans from a tin with a bent fork;
a spoonful of crunchy peanut butter from the jar; or
a slightly burnt sausage in a bap at a badly organised barbeque.

This is how it feels

For the first time since coming to Hong Kong in early 2003, I ate at a restaurant in "Rat Alley" this evening. It's round the back of Lan Kwai Fong ("the Fong"), an area in Central packed with bars and restaurants. It goes by the name Rat Alley because, plainly, it looks like an alley a rat would run along. But it's full of Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants, and plastic chairs and awnings, and people filing by with mobile phones clamped to their ears, and touts trying to entice you in, with a not-all-that-attractive routine involving shouting, gesturing, and holding up the menu either aggressively or plaintively.

I was there with J, from work, and we sat at a tiny table right on the street, next to a potted plant which kept on getting knocked over, and with a ringside view of a particularly hirsute Elvis-esque tout who seemed to know everyone, gwailos (westerners), little Thai girls with fat white western men, western women, Chinese men, everyone passing by an arm's length away. The food was an amalgam of Chinese, Vietnamese and Malaysian - so perhaps there's actually only one kitchen out the back for all the shopfronts and you get what's served.

I'm not often out on a Friday night; after work I tend to want to go home and regroup before the weekend. There seems to be a lot of people on the streets looking for someone - you can see it in their eyes; they're never quite satisfied with who they're with. I found it quite dispiriting.