The Dark Side of the Spoon

Rewind to March 25th…

This morning the clocks went forward, always a day with great importance to me for I’ve been a Summertime kind of guy all my life.

It is especially so this year, for it is also the last day I will ever spend in a commercial kitchen. Today, after 13 not very glorious years, I will dish out my last roast, flip my last burger, fry my last chip and wash my last greasy plate.

The day is proving to be as quiet as most of the preceding eight months, so no change there. And it’s hardly a surprise, seeing as I’ve almost been engineering it. Me and the boss here in Tooting have being doing a passable imitation of Turkey and Greece, snapping like turtles at each other over matters of no particular import. I don’t want to be here and he knows it. And now he’s solved the problem for me.

So there you go. A professional life which, looking back, has been much more drudgery than Ducasse, is approaching its last gasps, not so much fighting for life as begging for death.

There is a world out there, a world which can surely be explored without having to visit its dry stores and its walk-in freezers, its counter fridges and its mop cupboards.

I can’t speak fluent Greek, but I can construct a menu in it, I can do a shift in a Greek kitchen and know exactly what’s going on, but put me in front of a Greek soap opera and I’ll understand about half of it. I know the word for flat-leaf parsley, but not the word for flat.

To a lesser degree I’m the same in a few other languages.

That’s just a small example of how the work rules the world. It’s looking like my next serious work move will be back into customer services, which answers the question I answered at the start of this, viz; what the fuck am I going to do next?

That opportunity lurks some two months off into a future which could be anything. But for a while I want the future to be a place where you just go to work, do the job, go home, like the normal people.

Hopefully I’ll come out of it all changed, and able to get rid of my temperamental excesses, my weed excesses, my being alone excesses. The tunnel I could see no light at the end of a few months back is clearly aglow now, the exit doors bright.

I have to admit, this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to give it up. In Preston, back in 2001, I really thought I’d managed it. It didn’t do me much good, however. I lasted seven months on the dole before a text message out of the blue took me back to London, and the only kitchen I ever truly loved. Which proved to me once and for all the most concrete truth in life – you really never know what’s around the corner.

This time, though, I really have had enough.

It is 8.15pm on March 25, 2007. I turn off the machines, look around, make sure the taps are off. The last check I did was a chicken bbq baguette and a fishcakes. You won’t find either of them in Larousse. The journey I began on May 1 1993 is over. I was 29 then. In six days I will be 43.

I pull open the kitchen door and walk through it, hearing its oil-free squeak as it closes behind me. I do not look back.

It is two months later, and now at last I know what the fuck I am going to do next. I am going into customer services of a sort, but not in the way I envisaged at the end of March. I am going to work in a shop, but not just any shop, oh no. It is a shop which sells the largest range of spices and herbs I have ever seen. For those of us whose favourite aspect of being a chef was the whole alchemy thing, it is a dream. I will work with strange and exotic powders of many varieties, advising people how best to combine and utilise them. I will be able to use the magic within me, not waste it arm deep in greasy water, by passing it on, by explaining how that amazing and fabulous alchemy takes place.

On my first day I was asked which kind of paprika I would recommend for a certain dish. I found myself lifting each smoky red package out of the basket and lovingly describing what it would do. How the Hungarian rosen would give a brick-like depth of colour and flavour, how the smoked Spanish pimenton would make the dish smell of an evening in Seville, how the sweet Italian would be more like the subtle caress of a distantly remembered lover. I found myself going all, dare I say it, Nigel Slater on myself. And I loved it. And I looked into the future and I could see myself doing this for a long, long time. Not quite Epiphany, not yet, but at last a glimpse up an open road that I could see myself reaching the end of.

I find myself realising too, that without walking the roads I have previously walked, I would never have found this one.

It turns out I’m very good at selling spices. Which just goes to show what can change when you’re doing something you believe in. It’s not perfect, but then, what us? But when I’m working the shop floor, I love it. I can talk about this stuff confidently enough to know they’re listening. And many of them leave poorer than they intended. Today I sold this nice Anerucan girl five things she didn’t know she wanted. And another guy, later on, six things.

They both spent the best part of fifty quid which, I admit, isn’t that much round Notting Hill. But not bad, not bad.

Next two days the shop was visited by two young Australian ladies (separately). Both walked out having spent £15 more than they were planning, smiling like Cheshires. Great fun. It’s so nice doing something I believe in, and understand. I love working that shop floor.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Spice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.