Meals, Bloomsbury

Meals
First Floor
Heals Department Store
196 Tottenham Court Road
Bloomsbury
W1T
020 7636 1666
www.heals.co.uk/stry/healcafe

by H.P. Seuss

I was destined for greater things.

Had mother submitted to the boisterous attentions of the gang of raping mallards that patrolled our coop, I might have grown into one of them. I might have been fertilised a she-duck and swooped and swum as she did.

Alas, I was born nor he nor she, a shell of my own potential, eunuch and hermaphrodite, plopped by menstrual mother onto the straw of a Suffolk farm. But even in my unfertilised state, I was a god among eggs: sexless, it is true, but strong. And you can't spell hermaphrodite without Aphrodite. I was born for love.

I might have been subsumed into a Béarnaise, adorned a kedgeree. Not to be. Yoinked from the straw, dropped into a grey tray, we were bundled into a truck bound for London by a burly Lett. Not all of us survived the trip. A divot on the A14 made an impromptu omelet of three of us. I was among the five dozen unloaded on the Tottenham Court Road. Our ovacide had just begun.

Do not think we were deaf to the hiss of our siblings as they left the metaphorical fire of the fridge for the very literal frying pan. Do not think we didn't notice the lack of bacon in that shiny kitchen. My turn came one Sunday morning. Tap! Tap! Sploosh! I lurched into the fat and turned quite white. Two minutes later, I was flipped onto a revolting round patty of corned beef hash, my beautiful yolk ladelled with a concoction known as "H.P. Gravy".

Oh, I saw the handsome journalist raise an eyebrow when the waitress set me before him in that pink doll's house of a dining room. Sloshing in his mouth, I sensed his thoughts: "lovely egg; pity it has been so pretentiously massacred." In the pit of his stomach we became one. Through the ouija board of his prose I communicate now. The glass zooms about the table. It spells: A-V-O-I-D. Or was that A an O?