bouillabaisse and snake oil

since I was lucky enough to retrieve this correspondence from Google's voracious spam filter before it was recycled into a binary spam-and-egg quiche, I have published here PJ's letter concerning fond memories of his old friend's rambunctious gastric afflictions and associated antidote dependence.

thank you for your kind flattery, PJ, at least on my behalf. methinks, however, that perhaps JG will be underjoyed at the references to his former profligate ways with the booze and falling asleep on pizza, awaking to eat the drool-soaked leftovers, night-time attacks on other peoples' refrigerators, and the wanton theft of JP & Blackadder's milk. (While I much admired Blackadder's elaborate ruse - hiding a morning stash of milk the night before in a cereal bowl concealed in the back of the refrigerator and covered with a plate - I found this time consuming. After trialling an untenable plan involving small packs of UHT milk hidden in secret locations in the pantry I have had much success with simple threats and fulmination.)


Dear food tragics,

And tragic be thy name. I found myself dumbfounded, and I was not alone. For while I was singularly impressed with the obvious writing talents of VB and her even more obvious intelligence, I was astounded by the writer's naivety.

It concerns her sidekick JG. I was at once struck by this fellow's resemblance to a travelling snake oil salesman's assistant I once witnessed in my youth. The uncouth fellow would stand in front of the crowd while the salesman would hold forth on the evils of drinking and binge eating. He would stand hunched over, scratching his arse, farting and belching with particular force and thumping his chest in an obvious sign of indigestion distress. The salesman would then hold up a bottle of "Bubba Ho - Tep's Health Elixir" to the crowd, pour a good wack of it down the expectant throat of the stooge and then wait for the orders to roll in as the sick and indigestant chap is miraculously cured.

"What the?" I hear you say, which is not totally inappropriate given the likeness (or Ikeness as I prefer to call it when two people are thought of in the same breath, like Ike and Tina or Rove McManus and this JG bloke) of the afore mentioned comedy tragic to our hero. Well, anyway, the point of all this is, simply, this. Do not lay the blame of unwellness on a dodgy muscle and therefore by very association the cook, but rather, look to JG himself. I suspect he has not chewed the muscle in question with due diligence and the customary required 42 times in order to prevent indigestion and general stomach malaise. Cure him I say with some 21st century snake oil,"Quick-eze", encourage thorough mastication (his forté you may mistakenly think) and the indigestion should, unlike Macarthur "not return".

Yours, blah blah blah.