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I Tend To Eat At The Speed Of Light, But I Have Reasons (Some Might Say Excuses)

Shovel it in, I say, get it done

That’s what I’m talking about. Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

Let me clarify something right up front. I only eat because, well, I fucking have to, obviously. I don’t eat because I love eating. I am no foodie. I leave that to my eldest Son. If I could wake up and take a “food pill” that got me through the fucking day, I would.

So, here are the perfectly valid (?) reasons that I scoff my food down like there will be no tomorrow.

After spending a combined sum of almost ten years at boarding school and in the army, I learned the dubious art of eating quickly. Think of it as a survival technique.

Boarding School: We only had half-a-fucking-hour for lunch. Sounds reasonable? Well, not really. We had to queue for our grits and, depending on where one ended up in that fucking queue, defined the time you had left to eat. And this was a boys-only school. So, hundreds of starving young lads dashing and crashing and pushing and shoving to get ahead of each other.

And to make matters worse, teachers, prefects, and seniors went first.

And did they get on with it?

Not fucking likely.

And then we had to stand, trembling with low blood sugar, whilst a fucking prefect or sometimes a teacher (yes, even teachers have to eat) said grace.

So, more often than not, I ended up with about five or six minutes to shovel whatever shit was on the “menu” that day down my cake hole.

Not my best memory of boarding school.

The Army: The fucking army was even fucking worse (and here is where I can get expletive-happy after holding back in the boarding school bit). As some of you will know, just about everything fucking associated with any and all armies is that they are an organisational shit show. I think they probably invented the phrase “shit show.”

And meal times were the worst. It was never clear how long our meal breaks were. It all depended on some dumb-as-fucking-ditchwater corporal or sergeant. The officers, of course, had their own mess (dining room, dummy). We just had a mess, mess.

We would be doing some stupid shit on the parade ground and suddenly the chief dumbass would scream “Fok weg en kry jou kos, julle dom donders, en maak seker dat julle terug is hereso in twintig minute”.

For those one or two of you not fluent in Afrikaans, here is the translation:

“Fuck off and get your food, you dumb cunts, and make sure you are back here in twenty minutes.”

(I popped this bit in specially because Robin Wilding 💎 loves it when I talk Afrikaans).

Anyway, back to food.

So twenty minutes this time, and the same, if not worse, queuing issues. Coupled with fuck-heads all over the place shouting at us to “maak gou” (hurry up), like they needed to tell us, “gaan daar” (go there), “kom hier” (come here), “sak for twintig” (drop for twenty), you know, the usual shit.

And again, if we ended up with five minutes to actually eat, we were lucky. Often we had to grab something off our fucking tin plates, drop said plates in a barrel thingy for washing, and run back to the dreaded parade ground, stuffing our faces as we ran.

Not the best for one’s digestion.

So can you blame me for not losing a habit built up over ten years? The problem of course, these days, at my age, is fucking wind and lots of it. My better half still often says things like “Have you finished already?”

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