Home life
Unadulterated mirth
Alice Thomas Ellis
I've just had six years' worth of hair chopped off. It was either that or let it grow until I could sit on it and I always think people look slightly mad sitting on their hair, so it's gone. I felt some irration- al misgivings as I watched it disappearing into the black bag — as though it were an old pet more deserving of burial than just slinging in the garbage — but one of my New Year resolutions is not to take things out of black bags once I've put them in, so it's really gone. Poor Janet's rabbit, Jas- mine, has gone too. She died of old age but Janet blames me because several times recently I had remembered that she would make a nice wholesome stew since we knew what she'd been eating, unlike the supermarket chickens. Many a nourishing outer lettuce leaf, carrot peeling and wholemeal crust went into Jasmine rather than the black bag, and now she's taken them with her.
Alfie says I should keep chickens to recycle the household scraps, but his mum did that and when the time came to slaughter them she had to give them to a neighbour because she'd got fond of them. The neighbour said they were the best chickens he'd ever tasted and why didn't she just try a leg, and she said she couldn't and went off to have a cry. So it was all a bit pointless. I suppose it would be simpler if we just ate all the household scraps ourselves, but you can get sick of cabbage- stalk soup, bread pudding and fried potato peel. Besides I read somewhere recently that potato peel is deleterious to health. That makes just about everything, except for garlic, and garlic loses you friends.
I've already put the aluminium pans in the black bag (Alzheimers), cut down on the red meat (trichinosis, kuru, cholester- ol, radioactivity, artificial hormones), eggs (cholesterol, salmonella, and anyway the rotten things are never even fresh), milk (cholesterol, artificial hormones and some new chemical they have just thought of which makes cows produce even more of the stuff), orange and lemon zest (pesti- cides, herbicides or whatever they're squirting in the countries of origin), toma- toes (pesticides, herbicides, and they come from the same family as potatoes and deadly nightshade), potatoes (if they're a bit green they're poisonous, even if you give the skins to the chickens, and they come from the same family as tomatoes and deadly nightshade), parsnips (there was a rumour that yellow roots are carci- nogenic), turnips and swedes (nobody likes them), carrots (there was a rumour that a batch was washed in water contaminated by rat's pee), bread (if it's white it has had the goodness bashed out of it and if it's brown it may have been artificially tanned or contain ergot; and don't they put pesticides and herbicides on wheat?), broad-leaved vegetables (pesticides, herbi- cides and radioactivity), shellfish (always a bit dodgy, even before progress really took a hold), all the other fish (mercury, and when you think of what's going into the oceans you can't fancy them anyway). And, of course, chickens.
Then there's ptomaine, botulism, lister- iosis, and I dare say some things I've forgotten or never heard of, and I haven't even mentioned the additives — colouring, stabilisers, preservatives, artificial taste, etc. — that manufacturers pop into every- thing they manufacture. Jeff has a story about an ice-cream factory which sent a certain brand of ice-cream straight to the top of the index, and all in all I'm beginning to think I should have kept my hair and eaten it. It's all quite hopeless. Janet and I went once to a health-type restaurant in Covent Garden — vegeta- rian, organic, wholemeal pastry — and we both felt ill for days afterwards. The only thing that's quite pure is vodka and you can't live on it.
I think I will have a chicken to stay. The first-born has thought of a new word and is waiting for a chance to use it. Every time the chicken made an unexpected sound or gesture we would all cry: 'It's the poultry- guest' and fall about laughing. Laughing is supposed to be very good for you.
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