You know people who have a little joke with you - a minor entertaining interlude, and you think, "Oh that was fun." Then every time you see them for the next six years they nudge you in the ribs and say, "Ooo the loins, the loins." And you smile through clenched teeth and realise that the entire friendship is built on stale crisps soaked in rancid beer.
Yeah, well, I think I did that. It just sort of mushroomed - and was redolent of my balsamic vinegar crisis in late '98. At that time, I was despairing that my personality was being dragged into a middle-class morass by the cement shoes of useless information. In this plainly depressed state, I became the Cassandra of Arrugila and balsamic vinegar. I was shouting from the parapets of the noisiest brasserie, "Don't you see, balsamic vinegar is meaningless?" .
It's lucky I wasn't arrested. But the crisis in its own way was real. In this information age, we are totally subsumed by totty nonsense. Fashionable magazines that tell us "What's In" and "What's Out". Knowing the difference between Pauls: Smith, Gettier and Ice-cream. Conversations which orbit around coffees: macchiato, cappuccino, latte, Cuban, Guatemalan, New Guinean. Huehuetenango Coochamattan! Truly! It exists. .
Between newspapers, films, television and the internet, I can tell you the difference between a crack in the pavement, on the streets of New York, in Ireland and in Cyberspace - but I couldn't (at least honestly) tell you a single salient thing about Proust. .
Well - the Fish Loin Fiasco comes out of that state of mind. It started innocently enough. Tuna Loins were on the menu. It seemed a funny. "Fish can't have loins," I announced authoritatively, "They don't have legs!" .
"Loins aren't legs," retorted my hapless companion, "they're genitals." .
Well that's the sort of 'tis / 'tisn't argument that can't be resolved lightly. I started to do research - most of which centred around phoning and e-mailing friends and asking, "Do you have to have legs to have loins?" .
