Crispy Business Dave June 23, 2009 Blogs Sweary 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 Id done something utterly catastrophic on Friday, like running over the boffin hurrying to announce the cure for the common cold, which hed 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. Its my greatest fear that Ill do something like that like, that Ill unintentionally set in motion something with horrendous consequences for the world, not that Ill steal someones 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 doesnt 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 wasnt 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 bands 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 thats always late to the party because no one fucking cares whether its 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. Theres this Kit-Kat? the barman chanced. But when youve been lushing the fuck out of it since 3pm, theres no Kit-Kat in the world that will sate your salty hankerings. And in all fairness, whats in a Kit-Kat thats going to whither you up for more alcohol? I thought every barman worth his you-know-what understood that the more the customers tongue is shrivelled by the snacks available when the tummys 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 fucks sake, theres no nostalgia, escapism, or Mother Superior in the world that would make me go back to an Irish hotel which doesnt sell Taytos. If you cant even get the simple things right, what hope is there? And whats the point in hallucinatory jaunts into the past when they dont serve the appropriate culinary comforts? Tayto was launched in 1954. 1954!!! Hmm. Ive really got to stop blogging about crisps. (More from Sweary at http://www.coddlepot.com/) Tweet
