Busted chops
A few ripples ago in the undulations of time I shared a house with three other guys in Bethnal Green, Lahndan. Two of them were serious professional people like myself (ahem), and the third was a student from China. I forget his name, so let’s call him Herbert.

Herbert did a sterling job of dispelling the stereotype of the Asian student as quiet and hardworking, in that he was nocturnal, fetid, and bone fecking idle. He also never found the time to learn the rudiments of cooking, although he had no real reason to, since his mum turned up every fortnight or so with a whole fridge-freezer’s worth of frozen Tupperware tubs. This was cuisine from the old country as well, so it was usually drenched in a riot of unidentifiable spices.

One weekday at around 03:00, Herbert was hungry. He slunk down to the kitchen like a secret lemonade drinker and retrieved some of Mum’s best marinated pork chops from the freezer. Putting those principles of physics he had spent so long studying into action, he whacked them under the grill at maximum heat. By now the pangs of hunger in his savage breast were growing stronger so he stilled them with the soothing tones of speed garage.

Summoned from his bed by a combination of the fumes of a thousand spicy pigs burned at the stake and the collective vibration-induced departure of his fillings, my housemate stomped downstairs and proceeded to tear strips off Herbert for a good ten minutes*. The latter raced up to the relative safety of his room and left my housemate banging on the door and threatening to "throw [him] through the fucking window".

Herbert’s laziness did serve me well on one occasion: I had to have a broadband connection fitted and the only way to get to my room was through his. Had he not still been in bed at 14:00, the BT man would never have been able to route the cable. The same BT man managed to remain impressively cheerful, given that the atmosphere he had to negotiate contained about 5% oxygen and about 10% lightly fermented cum.

*Whether these strips then went under the grill, I don’t know.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Fri 7 Jan 2011, 11:18, Reply)