Washing up has never been so much fun. And Saturday nights spent washing up when you're 16-18 years old, should never have been THIS good. But they were.
The Halfway House in Carterhatch Lane, Enfield, was the first restaurant to be opened by the Beefeater chain. This fact I only discovered tonight as I looked it up on the internet in a boozy fit of nostalgia for the scene of some of the happiest days of my youth. So, why the beatification of so many hundreds of hours spent scraping unwanted French mustard from plates that were then loaded into plastic trays and pushed into industrial sized dishwashers, sending steam into our sweaty faces? Here's a list of reasons for my unnatural love for this low-paid, unsocial hours, menial job:
1. I worked there with two of my best friends, Chris and John, and they are two of the funniest people I've ever known. They are also two big gigglers. Nothing symbolises our time there more than Chris laughing so much that he collapsed into a heap onto the floor - which was always damp and grimy - drunkenly hysterical over something someone said, caught at that moment by the manager walking through the swing door from the restaurant into the kitchen, who was half-bemused and half-annoyed at the scene.
2. Chris's drunkenness at work was the inevitable result of having a hatch connecting the kitchen to the bar and having a barman called Tony the Animal who passed through that hatch a steady supply of unpaid-for pints of lager that we'd hide behind pots or pans and gulp down whenever the kitchen was momentarily empty of waitresses or managers.
3. Tony the Animal acquired that epithet on account of his graphic descriptions of what he and girlfriend Vicky - a waitress - got up to in the flat they shared. We looked up to him, because he was 19, had a girlfriend and a flat and a remarkable taste in music.
4. To keep morale in the kitchen high, the managers allowed us to bring into work a 80s ghetto blaster to play our music (as long as it couldn't be heard blasting through the hatch into the bar) and this meant that John, Chris and I constantly made compilation tapes for each other in an effort to get each other into another band or artist. At that age, it was a time of huge discovery. Bowie, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Cream, Hendrix - any classic rock from 15-20 years' previous. And Tony the Animal was similarly instrumental in adding to this canon, getting me into Pink Floyd (we even went to see them together at Wembley) and Frank Zappa (Tony's favourite song being, inevitably, Cocksuckers' Ball). No one else liked our music, though; the waitresses would swing in with 'what the fuck is this?' faces and come back 5 minutes later when the WOO WOOs from Sympathy for the Devil were still ringing out.
5. The Waitresses. I had a huge crush on Liz. John had a huge crush on.... shit, I can't remember her name, but we nicknamed her Amos, after Amos Brearly in Emmerdale Farm to tease him about her smoking a pipe, which she didn't.
6. The waitresses would make desserts in the kitchen. There was an ice-cream machine, a hot chocolate fudge machine and wafers. Needless to say, when no one was about, we filled bowls with ice-cream and hot chocolate fudge sauce and wafers and hid these with our pints of lager.
7. Stealing. I don't advocate stealing, but I felt justified in nicking handfuls of Mr Men badges (which were given to kids with their meals) for my little sister back home. We also nicked Scampi Flavour Fries to eat while we waited for our cab home (on which we spent half our wage, as the 217 bus had stopped running by the time we got out.) We had a name for the Scampi flavour fries, but I won't share it. We were 16 year old boys. What can I say?
8. Parties. There were several parties that we got to go to thanks to members of staff. The most cringe-worthingly memorable one for me was one in which Tony the Animal gave me amyl nitrate to sniff and I ended up doing press-ups in my pants to impress Liz. It didn't work. My pants were green and black stripy briefs and she had her boyfriend with her at the party. Probably, not my coolest move.
9. Breaded mushrooms. The chef, a temperamental, greasy haired, unsavoury-looking git, would slam his pots and pans down in the kitchen at the end of the night and we would raid these for the remnants of food that was cooked but not served. Breaded mushrooms proved a tasty dessert after all our other desserts and lagers.
So there you go. I didn't make 10 in my list, but I challenge any of you to list more 9 things you love about your current job.
