Swords, sorcery and spam

When I finally discovered my superpower last week during the visit to London, I remember thinking it had been a long time in coming.

I never really got superheroes as a child, I wasn’t that kind of kid. I certainly don’t recall any Marvel comics floating about the house when I was growing up. This is, like quite a few things, down to my father. When I was about five years old, he read us Watership Down at bedtime and I was totally hooked. It was, however, the next book that did all the real damage, because that’s when he read us The Hobbit. The moment he got to the end of the last page I just wanted him to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

It proved to be a worryingly formative experience, and kicked off what must have been a fifteen year habit of voraciously reading fantasy novels. First I read Lord of the Rings. Then I went back to the beginning and read it all over again. After that I read all the trilogies which had basically taken Lord of the Rings, changed all the character and place names but kept virtually the whole plot intact. You may be unamazed to hear that there are an awful lot of these; it appears to be the only genre I’ve ever seen where tribute bands have a legitimacy all their very own.

I even worked my way through the pretentious “edgy” fantasy novels. You could always tell these ones, because the hero was tormented or conflicted in some way. What's more, they usually involved complex words like “inchoate” which, at the age of ten, I didn’t entirely understand. One of them even had a leper as the main character, which was probably supposed to be a metaphor for something but in practice, appropriately enough, just meant that the quality dropped off as it went along.

The shades of morality in those books were somewhat difficult to get my head around given that in most fantasy novels the characters were not only questing for a mystical amulet but were also desperately in need of a second dimension, let alone a third. The ones you were meant to boo were usually distinguished by their names having the mildly telling prefix “The Dark Lord” or suffix “the Evil”. If only life was so simple - even now I sometimes turn to Kelly halfway through a film or TV programme and say “Is this guy a goodie or a baddie?” She generally responds with a look of exasperation; understandable, given that this is nearly always one of the stupidest questions there is.

As far as fantasy goes, I read the lot. If it formed part of a seven book series, each paperback comfortably big enough to stun a rhino, I was in. If the lead character was an enigmatic mercenary called Thrarg with a mysterious past, a cursed scimitar and a starring role in at least three separate prophecies, you can guarantee I had read it. If he was accompanied by a sentient war panther, so much the better.

One time on a caravan holiday in Devon we stopped by a bookshop only for me to find that the long awaited third book in a particular trilogy had come out (the classic The Wishsong of Shannara, in case you were interested, though I’m mainly ardently hoping that you’re not). I bought a copy and the rest of the holiday was spent finding every opportunity to slope away from my family to read it. I believe I read the last two hundred pages in the campsite’s communal toilet, the stench of diseased bowel movements not entirely managing to overpower the increasingly turgid prose.

After all, these books weigh in at six hundred pages for a reason, and only some of that can come down to the main characters having such long names. There’s a language you need to learn, too; in these books there was no such thing as “information”, only “lore” (nearly always ancient, or Elvish, or both - despite the fact that in every fantasy book you care to name the elves made Barbara Cartland look like a spring chicken). You were never “late”, always “waylaid” and that would be because rather than "fanny around" you had decided instead to "tarry". You never told someone to “piss off” when you could instruct them to “begone”. Adjectives like “gibbous” and “vorpal”, which I’m sure Lewis Carroll just invented for a laugh while out of his mind on laudanum, were used with a painfully earnest tone at all times.

Most frustrating of all is that adjectives like “gimp” were used by the normal kids at school to refer to people who read fantasy books. Harry Potter was many, many years too late to save the credibility of people like me. “I do wish he would read some novels which don’t involve goblins or extraterrestrials” said my English teacher’s school report one year. I was 15.

Really, I should have been into superheroes because however nerdy comic book readers were they still kicked metaphorical sand into the faces of all the fantasy fans. And the idea of being a bespectacled cipher who could go off and transform into an alpha male ought to have resonated with me. Maybe it would have done, if I hadn’t been so busy wishing I was a warlock of some description. I never did get to become a warlock; shame really, as it would have been a far better job title than any of the ones I’ve wound up with since.

But I’ve always been convinced that I must have some kind of superpower, it’s just that I’ve never known what it was. For years, I thought it might be my incredible ability to construct an innuendo out of practically anything. I had even worked out the name (“Captain Smut”) and decided that my superhero costume would be baggy jeans and an offensive slogan t-shirt. Then I realised that it didn’t involve any special effort or dressing up, which was even better because if you saw me in lycra “super” would be practically the last word to spring to mind, behind perhaps only “erotic”.

Then I thought my superpower might just be the ability to order badly in restaurants. What normally happens is that Kelly orders first and picks exactly what I would have gone for. Suddenly I am faced with the prospect of looking like one of those couples who wear matching cagoules and like folk concerts and wandering round National Trust properties every Sunday, so panicking I change plans on the spot and opt instead for my second choice. This is always, and I mean always, a mistake. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the dish I’ve ordered was a close second or a distant second, whenever it turns up the phrase “number two” acquires a very different meaning. Meanwhile Kelly chomps away looking not remotely apologetic. “You could have had the same thing as me.” she says between ecstatic mouthfuls, “I wouldn’t have minded.”

Anyway, my superpower is in fact a particularly virulent subspecies of ordering badly in restaurants. It came to me when Kelly and I were sitting in Polpo enjoying a delicious lunch and watching the clientele trying to work out if they were more pleased with the food or themselves. It was, in many cases, a close run thing. We had ordered plenty of tiny snacks to keep us going while we took on the serious business of running through the menu, but it was time to make a stand and pick some larger dishes.

“I’d like the sausage and salsa verde on a bed of lentils.” I said.

Kelly raised an eyebrow. When the dish arrived, her suspicion seemed justified. The lentils looked perfect, the salsa verde rich and pungent. It was the third element which proved problematic because it wasn’t recognisable as any form of sausage. There, quivering in a sinister fashion on top of the lentils, were thick pink rounds of gelatinous something. The penny dropped and I realised with an awful certainty that I had finally discovered my superpower.

I have an unerring ability to order things on a restaurant menu which are not billed as, but subsequently turn out to be, spam.

Like solving a troublesome clue in a cryptic crossword, all those previous experiences quickly fell into place. That “Italian sausage risotto” I once had in Carluccios on a rare lunchtime stop with Louise up in town. It looked like savoury rice with crumbled pink highlighter pen liberally scattered all over it, but the taste was pure spam. Or the chorizo pasta dish I had on a rainy afternoon in Dulwich Village with Kelly and Louise last year. They both went for the burger, but I didn’t listen because I had to be different. I was rewarded with a spectacularly disgusting dish that put the hurt into Herta; cubes of spam in an insipid tomato sauce the consistency of a thick sneeze.

Why couldn’t I have had a good superpower, like being invisible? At school a popular debate was whether you’d have chosen to be able to fly or turn invisible. Most of my friends were keen on soaring through the air, being able to see the world in a way most people never will. I on the other hand was keen to know exactly what people said about me when I wasn’t around, and if it didn’t work out in my favour there were always the consolations of the girls’ changing room.

Unfortunately at the end of this epiphany the spam was still there, balefully squatting on the lentils. I cut off a rubbery piece and reluctantly put it in my mouth. The closest thing I can compare it to, odd though it might sound, was the time I went to see Doctor Harrold for a so-called routine appointment and she ended up sticking her finger up my arse. It was nowhere near as unpleasant as I thought it would be, but that didn’t stop me thinking that in a cosmos more perfectly ordered than this it would simply never have happened at all.

The odious group next to us ordered it too, to my immense satisfaction. Part way through, one of them said “I never knew this would turn out to be spam and lentils.” You and me both, I chuckled to myself. Then a couple arrived at the table next to us, towards the end of the lunch sitting. The waiter told them they’d have to order in a rush. They looked like proper tourists, up in London for the day, who had accidentally stumbled upon one of the hottest lunch joints in the city right now without the faintest idea it was any better than a Pizza Express. I’m sure half the clientele was looking down on them, but I wasn’t. They were a total antithesis to the couple who’d occupied that table before, talking about modern movements in cinema like the ultimate Guardian-reading mutual masturbation disguised as a lunch date. They didn’t fit, and I loved them for it.

“The sausages and Italian lentils sounds nice.” he said to her, keen to impress, clueless and endearing. My heart went out to him.

“Don’t order it, it’s just like spam.” said Kelly, leaning across in their general direction.

“Really?”

“Yes." I said, “The best thing I had on the menu is the wild mushroom piadina.”

They thanked us effusively from the moment that the waiter took their order to the moment we threw on our coats and headed off down Carnaby Street. And maybe that’s how I can use my superpower for the forces of good, by warning people that they’re about to make a ghastly gastronomic mistake.

I recounted the story to Louise over a cocktail just off Bond Street later that afternoon. It was the least I could do, given that she was normally present when my superpowers were invoked. My cocktail was a delicious fruity concoction, rich with apple, cinnamon and brandy. At first I was disappointed. I was really in the mood for a Bloody Mary and I couldn’t find it anywhere on the drinks menu. I even considered asking them if they could make me one, but I eventually thought better of it. They probably would have ended up fixing me a Spamtini anyway.