Black crisps

On the stroke of noon Gemma, Manga Dave and I left our desks and rushed down to the canteen, fleeing from our to do lists like terrified citizens in a Godzilla movie. Some days lunchtime really can’t come soon enough, and today was a prime example.

The menu pinned to the notice board boasted “WE LOVE FOOD”, but I always think it’s hard to love something you can’t spell. I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that “Stake Kidney Pie” was a deliberate nod to Halloween, but however charitable you feel there’s simply no excuse for “chicken jalfrazi” or “tatare sauce”, whatever they are. The literature produced by our canteen is so moronic you assume it’s in Comic Sans and then have to pinch yourself when you realise it’s not.

Unable to find anything I wanted to eat I went for a red-themed lunch of champions; ready salted crisps, Kit-Kat (four-finger not Chunky, sadly, but you can’t have everything), can of Dr Pepper. We started talking about our weekends and over her chicken jalfrazi Gemma told us she was off to Portsmouth to play “pub golf”, a game in which you have to go to eighteen pubs in a row and drink a different alcoholic beverage in every one. The fact that I couldn’t see any way in which this was appealing made me feel about a hundred years old.

Then I said something almost without thinking.

“Yeuch, black crisp.”

Gemma and Dave looked at me with bemusement as I set the offending crisp down on the table. It looked ordinary enough from one side, granted, but looking at it from the other its brown edges had turned a manky black, the colour of purest wrong, a colour no crisp should be.

“What are you talking about?” said Gemma.

“Look at it. I’m not eating that. Or this one, it’s got a funny grey patch in it.”

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” said Dave. “They all taste exactly the same.”

”They don’t. You can definitely tell. Crisps with grey bits have a different texture, like stale cardboard or something. I think they’re like tuber tumours. And crisps with eyes in are even worse. Oh, and green crisps. Let’s not even go there with the green crisps.”

The look on both their faces clearly emphasised that my little soliloquy had probably gone on a bit too long.

“Maybe you’d be better off with Pringles.” said Dave. “They’re all exactly the same shape and texture.”

“Good god no. That just means all the grey nasty bits have been mashed up and hidden. They’re even worse.”

Sitting there cradling my Dr Pepper, with a couple of substandard crisps in front of me, I had a growing realisation that I was probably coming across as more than slightly mentally unstable. It had all seemed perfectly normal in my head, but maybe everybody who’s deranged thinks that. Maybe one day, through a series of events each of which seems perfectly normal to you, you end up at home wearing a tinfoil hat convinced that the government is trying to poison you by sending you pizza delivery brochures full of anthrax.

“Do you realise you’ve inspected every single crisp you’ve eaten? You take them out of the packet one by one, look at one side, turn them over, look at the other side and then you eat them.” said Gemma.

“Well, obviously. That’s how I make sure there aren’t any bad ones.”

“It’s very serial killer. Consider yourself judged.” said Dave.

“Does that mean you wouldn’t just take a massive handful and stuff them in your mouth in one go?” said Gemma.

I shuddered, which answered that question and probably quite a few more that they now didn't need to ask. The expressions on both their faces had gone from bafflement to pity. I wasn't sure which was worse.

“Come on, we’ve all got our foibles and this is mine. Well, this and books. I can’t lend someone a book. If it comes back with a crease down the spine it’s ruined, I’d rather they kept it than gave it back to me looking like that.

“And people who fold the corners over on pages to keep their place. When I see somebody doing that I feel physically ill. And if I buy a newspaper I can’t buy the one at the front of the display stand, I have to take the one behind it. Someone might have touched the one at the front.

“Oh, and CDs. Until I got an iPod I wouldn’t buy a record, even if it was by a band I like, if it didn’t come in a jewel case. I can’t stand those digipack things. Don’t even start me on the ones where you have to pull the CD out of a paper sleeve. It’s just wrong.”

They looked like they didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or sneak off and telephone the mental health authorities. Dave summed things up with depressing brevity.

“You’re a bit of a freak, are you?”

Worst of all, when he said it I felt like he was reading my mind. Maybe I will need that tinfoil hat after all.