Next time I will gorge my face thoroughly before setting off. After visiting Jingo in his squalid house the other day, I left with distinct stomach complaints, still reeling from only eating a third of a micro-waved pizza in the space of 8 hours. When the terms 'Jingo', 'his house' and 'food' are all mixed together, expect one disgusting dish to result.
I arrived after a long but enjoyable walk from mine to his (only about 30 minutes at super-quick Torquerama pace: 45 minutes for everyone else). Approaching the front of his house, I noticed that there were a large number of wasps entering and leaving the eaves just below the roof. I nervously rapped on the door, hoping they wouldn't notice me. Jingo scrambled down the stairs: he looked rather handsome through the warped effect glass of his front door. It opened with a creak and a big ugly face beamed out at me.
"Torquer? What time do you call this?" Jingo groaned.
"I call it eleven o'clock, the time you invited me to come over."
"Ohhhh. There's Nick now," he pointed behind me.
"Hi guys! Sorry I'm late," Jingo's Chemistry GCSE rival chirped, "I slept in a bit."
"Slept in?" Jingo questioned, ever the nocturnal being.
"My alarm clock must be broken. I only woke up at eight o'clock."
"Strewth," I said, "Try not to steal all the day light hours."
And so we ventured inside, into the murky innards of a fairly normal looking detached house (rich bastard), filled with interesting artifacts from Jingo's travels. Or perhaps just eBay. Yep, just eBay it turns out.
We went straight up stairs the Jingo's bedroom. We just played Command & Conquer OK. Turns out my skills lie only with driving and shooting games on the PS2 (someone buy me a PS3 please). Nick and Jingo completed the missions in no time: I routinely failed.
"So what's for lunch?" I asked the hostess, staring fearfully at Jingo's unmade bed, for I swear I saw some kind of insect scurry beneath the roughly strewn covers.
"Pizza and carrot cake," he replied, with an air of pride - like he had made it himself.
But it turns out Jingo's skills lie only with Command & Conquer. When it comes to cooking, he actually has minus 4 Michelin stars. We were supposed to be eating pizza:
"Right, then. What do we do with this then?" said Jingo inquisitively, holding the pizza upside down.
"We need to preheat the oven and rack to 200 degrees, and then cook for 13 minutes," I replied, after righting the box.
While Nick amused himself playing with fridge magnets, I wrenched open the oven tenaciously... and nearly fainted. On the inside edges of this ordinary looking Hotpoint oven was a layer of grease so thick it looked like our good friend Robin had washed his hair in it.
"What the bloody hell is going on in here? Where on this oven does it say you can use it as a sideways chip pan?" I screamed, making one of the magnets fall off the fridge.
"Err, we don't use it that much really," Jingo sulked.
"Strewth on a stick. How are we supposed to cook this?" I said waving the frozen pizza about.
It turns out that Jingo's crappy Sanyo microwave does not have a convection oven setting (unlike my Sharp). I was going to suggest cleaning the oven, but I thought they might not have any cleaning fluid in the house, given the state of the bathroom. Nick was also starting to pine hungrily, so I gave in to his persistence and microwaved the pizza.
After all the tribulations we ended watching Dara O'Brien doing live standup on DVD while slowly chewing our soggy pizzas. My slice didn't even have any chicken on it.
