Pie, Chips & A Few Loose Teeth Part I

By Eugene de Paule-Berger

In our post-historic world of rampant liberalism, there are few things more suspiciously predatory as a journalist, than the editor-in-chief of THE GROUNDSMAN, Archie McBurnie, offering to take you out to dinner in a glamorous Manchester establishment on a rainy Friday night in December. Either there was fuckery afoot and I was about to get the sack, told to be out of the office by morning, or something was to be celebrated between me and this other middle-aged man, well past his prime, over much clinking of glasses and waving of arms. Both prospects were somewhat anxiety-inducing to me, as I was frail, exhausted by the week’s adventures and on an empty stomach. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

Archie had chosen The French at the Midland Hotel, another worrying factor. McBurnie considers any restaurant in which the napkins are folded rather than rolled to be showing off, and once returned a bowl of vichyssoise on the grounds that soup ought not, under ordinary circumstances, to be cold. Yet here he was, beneath the great old swanky ceilings of the Midland, examining a menu with an expression he normally reserves for an unfinished column an hour before press. He was wearing a terrible, battered old blazer which, I knew for a fact, his wife had been badgering him to throw in the bin for years, but which he seemed determined to continue wearing to every conceivable occasion out of spite.

We shook hands and I sat down in one of the plush, golden-brownish velvet chairs, looking about the room in silent approval. The garçon gracefully materialised beside me and I ordered a bottle of 2016 Henri Bourgeois Cuvée d’Antan, a little reminder of France amid the burning hellscape of wine menus considered for the British palate. I reminisced about the Loire Valley, my home for a while, thinking how I might soon find myself on the first aeroplane home, basking in the glory of the rising sun: the return of the prodigal son, back to enjoy a platter of oysters and an assortment of different vintages with my childhood friends on the market square, amid the iron regiments of third-age Saturday-morning vegetable shoppers.

My reverie was cut short by the overbearing form of Archie looming in front of me.

“Ten bloody good years,” he said.

I put down my wine, closing my eyes and letting the wine dance away it’s farandole: Opening with lime, followed shortly thereafter by a tone of gunflint. Fading, but then returning louder now with grapefruit and almonds flowing and ebbing out of time and space with the pulsing of my heart. I opened my eyes again.

“What’s that, Archie?”

“You,” he said, with that wide-eyed, monosyllabic savagery of insistence upon something already said which is peculiar to those in the North. This, to me required clarification, and as a proud Frenchman I was not about to let this brute of a balding anglo-saxon drag me, grunting and sweating alongside him, into the lower depths of English linguistic hell. I raised an eyebrow, lowering the other one knowingly.

“You, at THE GROUNDSMAN,” he repeated bluntly, clicking his fingers at some far-off waiter behind me.

“Ah.”

“You’d forgotten.”

“Well, I hoped you had.”

He ignored this. I went back to looking at his miserable blazer. I had seen him attend three funerals, one disciplinary hearing and a Lancashire FA dinner at which, following an administrative misunderstanding concerning the seating plan, he had spent most of the evening sandwiched between the commercial director of Morecambe and a manufacturer of industrial drainage pumps, much to his chagrin. It was a legendary blazer, I must say.

After some time, and much reminiscing. Our first course floated delicately towards our table, leaving a thin mist of vapor trailing behind the nimble waiting staff. It was a quite beautiful thing, this first course and therefore I shall not describe it within the pages of THE GROUNDSMAN, which are reserved only for the gracious reviewing of such delicacies as mushy peas, baked beans on toast and toad-in-the-hole. In any case, if you have to know, it contained, as I remember, something cured and something smoked, with three esoteric-looking pieces positioned with tweezers. McBurnie ate his in approximately six bites.

“We’re doing something for the anniversary number,” he said, looking up from his foray into heaven.

“What anniversary number?”

“Yours.”

“I was not aware I merited a number.”

“You don’t. We’ve already got the paper. Your ten-year anniversary’s coming up next week.”

“Oh, quite.”

“I was going to give you a handsome bonus, but Debbie from Accounting was having none of it. So you get a nice little retrospective piece and a nice meal out. How do you like that?”

“Great,” I replied, staring out of the window into the Manchester nightlife.

Across the street, a drunkard was pissing on the restaurant bins, waving his middle finger towards the sky.

This finally explained the dinner.

He reached down beside his chair and produced a manila folder.

Inside were photocopies of some of my earliest contributions to the magazine. I recognised them immediately. A review of directors’ box catering at Torquay United. Six hundred words on the correct temperature at which Bovril ought to be served. A largely unnecessary investigation into whether the cheese-and-onion pie available at a certain Lancashire ground actually contained cheese — a precursor piece, I dare say. A column entitled THE GRAVY QUESTION, which I had, at the time, considered worthy of a sequel.

I shuddered at the thought.

I looked up.

“You kept these?”

“We keep everything.”

“Why?”

“Nobody knows.”

He poured himself more wine.

Savage.

“What I want, Eugene,” he said, “is one of your old pieces.”

“I have just spent several minutes looking at them. They are dreadful!” I almost shouted.

“No, no. An old piece, but now.”

I waited.

“Football food. The good stuff.”

“No.”

“Pie huts, clubhouses, chips, peas. You know.”

“No.”

“Scran!” he shouted at me, laughing.

I looked about, slightly embarrassed by this heathen of a man.

“Please don’t say that word in here. They’ll have us out by the scruff of the neck.”

“Three thousand words, minimum.”

“Absolutely not!” I protested, wagging my index finger around with great gusto before reaching for the wine bottle.

“You’ve got a fortnight.”

Needless to say, I downed that bottle and a few others with the man afterwards. I have known Archie McBurnie long enough to recognise when negotiations are concluded, and that any further provocation will be met by the violent waving of company contracts and disclosure agreements in front of my face, accompanied by red-faced threats of legal action and back-alley punch-ups. So, defeated and slightly intoxicated, I decided to shut up and surrender my weekend to a fate of torturous remembrance and anxiety.

For nearly ten years, I had travelled about the British Isles on behalf of THE GROUNDSMAN: to restaurants, pubs, boardrooms, racecourse dining rooms, supporters’ clubs, motorway services and various catering structures assembled from corrugated iron and held together by stale beer stains. I had eaten turbot in Mayfair with England internationals and meat pies in portable toilets converted, with limited success, into fancy kiosks with pallet seating, after the Parisian fashion. I had been served champagne by a club chairman who would be arrested several months later for cocaine trafficking and wound up dead in a Napoli back alley. Naturally, I had written about the champagne. A Jacques Selosse Initial if I recall correctly. This, McBurnie suggested over our third Wild Turkey pickleback (we had long since, moved on to the bar), was precisely the problem.

“You remember restaurants and odd little details of no importance, other than to snobs and toffs – Both of which you are. I want the obscure stuff. The things you remember when you aren’t trying to be a stuck-up French cunt.”

“Okay,” I said.

It was the nearest he had ever come to giving literary advice. And I respected him for his newfound vocation.

END OF PART I.