Down in the Hole

Malaise is the colour of whole-egg mayonnaise,

Last night I made toad in the hole for dinner,

It took me two tries, because I was without a spatula, 

Or anything like it,

And I was working by head-torch, like a miner,

This morning I also made toad in the hole for breakfast,

It is true sometimes that you are what you eat.

They say that the egg is a whole food, they say it contains a vast array of nutrients, everything a baby chicken needs to survive and develop. At the time that they told me this, I found it to be a very strong argument in favour of the egg's nutritional clout. Now, many years later, I wonder if a baby chicken is perhaps not the best candidate to represent my nutritional needs. Sometimes I wonder how much the quality of the lighting affects your susceptibility to arguments. Like those 'before and after' shots where they show overweight people in terrible lighting, and then show them, in nice lighting, sucking in their tummies. It looks convincing the first 30 times you see it. The nice thing about the 'before and after' shot of course, what gives it power, is the narrative. Each photo contains a little 'Once upon a time..... and they lived happily ever after' story, distilled like hard liquor, so that it fits into a single picture frame. 

Now, thanks to the advents/misfortunes of free time, social networking, and a complete saturation in advertising, tactics such as 'before and after' photos are somewhat overwrought, somewhat pathetic.To me, at least, and I have body-image issues too, although they are only very faint voices. And yet these images are still used so much, I see such a mind-boggling amount of these 'before and after' shots, not just tummy-sucking, but more and more of abs, biceps, triceps, made oily and shiny. Is this really successful? I suppose I still know a lot of people who think that the spoon-bending trick is real, what a waste of a great illusion.

Of course, I also have a marching band inside my head. This sometimes makes it very hard to pay attention to anyone at all, but it occurs to me now that if there are voices in your head telling you that you're crap, it helps to have a marching band to drown them out.

Kurt Vonnegut just told me that his number one rule for writing short stories is that you should 'Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time is wasted'. At first, I thought he was talking about the characters, that for instance, you should not write in detail about the 4 hours they spent on facebook. Then I realised that he probably means the reader, that you should not waste the reader's time. Well, if you're reading this because you followed a link on facebook, then you were quite possibly already wasting your time in the first place. So let's continue, I wanted to clarify something.

Different people have different ideas of what 'toad in the hole' is. When I refer to it, I mean, getting a slice of bread, cutting a hole out of its centre, frying it, and cracking an egg into the bread-cavity. The result is pan-fried bread with egg filling. It is difficult to flip the new hybrid slice without a spatula, but the flipping is absolutely imperative. The small leftover pieces of bread can also be fried alongside, and either be used as croutons to dip into the yolk, or if you're a cooked-yolk kind of person, you can just eat them whilst you're waiting for everything to cook.