Guilty Of Being Whyte

Have to backblip this one, as yesterday ended up being too hectic for me to get anywhere near a computer. In fact, I came within an hour of not taking a picture at all, but remembered my Blip duty just after 11pm, and managed to snap this hasty portrait. It's actually quite a relevant picture for me to blip, as a journal of my life can't really be complete without some kind of reference to the nutters people I know and spend my days around.

This is Andy. I can't remember exactly when we met, but it was definitely at some point between 2003 and 2005, and involved obscene amounts of alcohol. We ended up working together by some strange twist of fate, and as a result my last few years of wage-labour have been a fascinating voyage. Between drunken tirades after-hours (including his bizarre theory about how Japanese people go for months without urinating), and on-shift mischief (giving the waiting-on staff sex toys constructed from vegetables), time spent around Andy is rarely boring.

Sunday was his last shift before going on holiday to India for six weeks, and he was determined to mark it a half-decent practical joke. Taking inspiration from the time we accidentally burned a sticky toffee pudding and smoked out the entire building, he decided to cremate a batch of Yorkshire puddings and send them down to the bar to give the waiting-on staff a smoky welcome. Not the most inventive idea in the world, but passable enough for a sunny Sunday.

With the slowly blackening puddings doing nicely in the oven, all was going well. Unfortunately, Andy then made the slightly ill-judged decision of opening the oven door and spraying them with a blowtorch. Rather than giving them the extra-charred effect he'd been hoping for, the yorkies immediately - and quite vigorously - caught fire inside the oven. Grabbing the baking tray with a pair of tongs and bearing a slightly panicked expression, he made for the nearest sink, and got about halfway there before losing hold of the tray and sending flaming puddings all over the kitchen. Cue me and Sam, our other on-duty member of staff, stamping the offending combustibles out and waving our arms around like monged ravers. Determined not to have his joke foiled, Andy lobbed the freshly-extinguished yorkies into the food-lift and sent them down to the bar anyway. With a kitchen full of smoke and a floor covered in crushed pudding cinders, there was a fairly hefty clean-up operation required, and we set about that in good spirits. At least, until I realised that the last yorkie had set our dry cloth pile ablaze.

Here, Andy relaxes over a pint after a hard day of setting things on fire. I wonder idly how he'll get on in India. I also wonder if there'll still be an India left by the time he's finished.