My Lunch

For lunch I made a highly acceptable moules marinières which I ate in combination with freshly baked French bread. The combination of mussels, white wine, butter, parsley, garlic, and shallots was akin to a thousand naked, nubile angels massaging my each and every taste bud with precious unguents. Only one thing marred my ultimate satisfaction: the premature death of some of my ingredients.

I’d bought about 2lbs of apparently healthy mussels earlier in the day. However, when the time came to clean and “beard” the things, I discovered that the mortality rate was something like 10 per cent. There were at least five bivalve corpses in the bag, and another two or three on the critical list. That's to say, though their shells were open in imitation of death, they remained closed when I then squeezed them shut, apparently recovered. But for how long, exactly? Whatever, it wasn't a good sign.

In my opinion, you ought to be able to dial 999 and summon some sort of Emergency Service dedicated to mussel revival. So if, like me, you've got some that look a bit dodgy, you could summon paramedics to give them oxygen, heart massage, or whatever, to keep them alive just long enough to get them into the pan.

I'd like to know what killed them in the first place, though. I think it might have been suicide. They could have heard me chopping the shallots and smelled the wine and butter mixture bubbling away, and thought, "Fuck! This is it! I'm going to die a horrible death!" Whereupon, rather than let me have the satisfaction of killing and eating them, they took their own lives.

Then again, I suppose I should be thankful that they weren’t Islamic fundamentalist suicide mussels, otherwise they might have tried to take me with them, too, pissed off over the UK’s support (and, by extension, mine) for the invasion of Iraq and the actions of Coalition forces in Afghanistan. Forty or so bivalve jihadists could probably self-detonate in my shopping bag with lethal results, simply by farting in unison while keeping their shells tightly shut.

In future, to minimize the risk of this happening, I’ll be careful to always buy a few rashers of Danish bacon whenever I shop for mussels. That way, if they are members of Al-Quaeda's seafood division, the proximity of the forbidden meat should dissuade them from exploding, lest they turn up at the Gates of Paradise all smoky bacon-flavoured. Allah, Muhammad, and the 72 allotted bivalve virgins would, I’m sure, be less than impressed.