cwt

A Brief Encounter
You ask how I earned my millions? It’s funny. I remember the old man extremely happy that we had been of help and insisted that we have lunch with him. We sloshed up the wet, cultivated slope to the village behind the Catholic church as he hobbled on his cane. We had laboured all morning to prepare his tiny vegetable garden and I winced to think that it would have taken me under twenty minutes to do the same work at home in Wiltfordshire.
At the homestead, we basked outside sipping some sour yellowish liquid which tasted like over-ripe bananas as his old wife cooked on an open fire. The meat was already cut as she blended some green leaves into a thick gravy, added some red pepper and stirred slowly. I would have preferred to find a ready meal for I had an abhorrence of everything the natives cooked. I looked away from her to forget some of the stories I had heard. She took her own good time cutting this, adding that so that after an hour or so, it was clear that the time the meal took to make was more important than the meal itself. But again it captured a whole philosophy of a people; their patience in negotiation, in walking, rearing children, religion – indeed, in life itself, and showed me the stupidity of my own London traffic crammed life.
When it eventually came, the meal consisted of Chicken soup and yellowish-green mashed potatoes. The soup looked rather like a few drumsticks floating in fresh blood with various different coloured seeds here and there - and smelt of herbs and capsules. But it tasted great – like…like doughnuts that had been treated with… with…peppered citrus cream? And it was good…very good. The lingering peppery pinch of soup always brings back images of the enigmatic old lady smiling and stooping over the fire. I gobbled it up and asked for more. When we rose to go, our host told my sister something in Swahili. She winced, then smiled, regarding me as I licked my fingers. I asked her what it was. She said she’d tell me later. It was Christmas ten months later that the taste of salmon brought back the memories to her. She turned to me and said, ‘You know, that time you asked me what the old man had said, I didn’t tell you. He’d said we shouldn’t go worrying what it was we had eaten. It was a porcupine he had caught.’ Of course it would have been silly to throw up then! The ludicrousness of it led me back to Africa. In six months, I had collected a hundred and six recipes and - had made several hotels close!