IT’S a dead rat.
One that died in your roof, and had been lying there for so long that the thin, white bones are exposed.
Those were my thoughts, looking at the Amuse-bouche I was served at a recent five-star awards ceremony in Johannesburg.
‘Amuse-bouche’ according to Google, is French for ‘mouth amuser’, and served as an appetiser.
My mouth wasn’t amused with the raw, thin white stems of some mushroom variety, garnished with a little yellow speck of something looking like vomit next to a microscopic-thin slice of radish.
It tasted like cardboard sprinkled with dust.
I wasn’t going to pretend that it’s appetising if it’s not, so I pushed it aside.
The devil’s heart
The Hors d’oeuvre turned out to be another culinary murder mystery; one tiny cube of what could’ve been fish, bobbing around in a sea of coconut milk.
I returned that too, so pretty soon I was hungry enough to lick the listeria off a polony factory’s floor.
Death, when it eventually arrived, was Satan’s black heart on a big white plate, the severed arteries still attached.
On closer inspection it turned out to be a chunk of something that was once juicy and pink, but now the colour of evil, and as dry as Kim Jong-un’s sense of humour.
The arteries seemed to be baby carrots which have been dyed black to go with the theme; Black and White.
On the menu the main was described as ‘charcoaled fillet’, but although it looked like a bricket, and was about the same size, it didn’t taste like the kitchen burned down.
That would’ve at least been something but, without salt and a sauce of some kind, it tasted of outer space.
So it might as well, when it was alive, been attached to a Labrador.
It was at this point that I started to suspect that the organisers were out to kill me, either by poison or starvation, or for in case the caterer bungles it, they hired an assassin, pretending to be some sort of magic mind reader, as entertainment.
He almost got to me because at one stage I seriously considered throwing myself onto my dessert spoon.
At that moment, impaling myself onto a blunt object, seemed far less painful than having to sit through another one of his 30-minute-long card tricks.
In an attempt to regain my sanity I started looking at the people seated around me, stuffing their stained mouths with chunks of dyed-black dog.
The great pretenders
At the next table was a guy with a neatly trimmed black beard underneath carefully styled bleached hair.
He talked with his hands, and like Elton John, must be good on the piano but sucks on the organ.
On my other side sat a man wearing a ridiculous suit, tailored from white fabric dotted with Freddie Mercury’s face.
There were many: The woman who pretended to be a man, and who thought wearing trousers with suspenders and a straw-hat will not make her look like Amish Danny DeVito.
The sultry brunette in the high heels which, after a five minute conversation in the smoking area, left me highly suspicious of her real gender.
It was at this point that I wished to be back home.
In Zululand.
Where the only pretending we do, is to pretend to be use to the heat.
