I have an unresolvable debate with my friend Iain.
As to what tastes worse out of dog poo and PVA glue. I wish I could say this was a hypothetical pub debate like "who would win out of Spiderman versus the Taleban or Batman versus the I.R.A?"; I wish so much our discussions on the subject could be littered with riders like "probably" and "I imagine", but they can't.

Iain's experience first: The scene - primary school; the time - lunchtime, just after an art lesson. He has just finished his sandwich and is on to his tasty treat, a pot of yoghurt.

He's not sure exactly what went wrong but the popular theory is that he was absent-mindedly chatting to a friend, probably about jobbies. He reaches out to grab his lunch, but without looking he is not paying due attention, and grabs the yoghurt pot to his left. Of course, like all underfunded state schools, we kept our PVA in whatever containers were easily acquired.

The predictable happens. He has no reason to believe that the white gloop heading towards his boyish mug is anything but Onken's finest, and takes a load of polyvinyl acetate in his gob, long before he's old enough to have a bunch of gay jokes made at his expense about the matter. He characterises the taste as "the worst thing ever", and "indescribable". When pushed for adjectives, "bitter as fuck, chemical, chemical, chemical".

Now mine: We've moved onto high school by this stage and the favourite lunchtime activity among us laddish lads is football at the nearby Edinburgh Links. Because I'm rubbish at football and not especially popular I'm usually in goals, to the extent that I actually get okay at it; as such I actually did save the goal that I believe caused my downfall.

It was a muddy day but I made the dive anyway. I needn't tell you that the mud wasn't one hundred per cent soil plus water, but I couldn't have known that at the time. I did wash my hands afterwards, obviously, before I had my sandwich, but that didn't stop the most atrociously bitter, horrendous sensation flooding my mouth on the first bite. Strangely, it doesn't taste like it smells; it's worse. It tastes more like every horrible flavour you can imagine rolled into one and multiplied by five. It tastes, I suppose, like the worst thing ever. Indescribable.

I maintain dog turd must taste worse because our descriptions sound similar, even though I had washed all visible traces off my hands and experienced it by way of a sandwich, whereas he'd had a full-on spoonful. Either way: I really hope no-one can ever resolve this dispute.
(StapMyVitals wouldn't mind a bit of that, Thu 26 May 2011, 16:56, 1 reply)

A rematch is called for.
Blind tasting ?
(Bitter and Twisted, Fri 27 May 2011, 1:09, closed)