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FROM ‘GHOST QUEEN’
Ghost Queen
Beautifully deranged story about extreme cuisine
My quest for outré culinary excellence certainly did not begin with the standard fare dished up to us hapless fucking sheep strapped into our seats on the Nigerian airbus, Lagos to Kano. The set dinner — which I refused with anger — looked a shrink-wrapped nightmare: an ocean of pus-like powdered egg swirling around volcanic lumps of cloacal yam: the whole blasted seascape straddled by two huge mahogany turds — presumably frankfurters — lying helplessly across the cheap plastic tray like stranded zeppelins. Fuck that. I would have none of it. Instead, following the faxed advice of my guide and mentor Jonathan Briggs, I whispered to the hostess a request for ‘total bush meat’, otherwise known to insiders as ‘home-fired.’
For those who know, most West African airlines run parallel meal offerings to their passengers: on the one hand, they give out salmonella-ridden plastic TV dinners from slave factories near Heathrow; on the other, you can get authentic and nutritious local African meals, secreted illegally on to aircraft by wily cabin staff in coded rubbish bins and disguised latrine buckets. My hostess Beatrice, a buxom negress with a tribally scarred face and buttocks inflated to bursting point, showed no signs of having heard my appeal, even when I grabbed…
