Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I love the idea of ‘fingertight’ — an unscientific but perfectly intelligible description of a degree of mechanical closure — but I live well outside the standard range (normal variation between individual grips) on which it is based.

Once I’d started using the gas-ring I began to itch for more complex acts of cooking. Hall food even at its best was bland, so in a mood of nostalgia for the food at Mrs Osborne’s I started making curries. On Mum’s kitchen bookshelf at Trees there was a book of International Cookery which included some timid versions of Indian dishes, though she had only indulged me with them before I actually went to India. At the time she must have thought a plateful of tentatively spiced rice was the nearest I was going to get to the subcontinent.

It happened that the nearest shop to me geographically, on Regent Street, had a fair range of spices. It was essentially Indian, despite bearing the name of Harold T. Cox. I could get all sorts of exotic treats there.

The A-staircase kitchen was the scene of frenzied frying, making nonsense of the ban on this most alluring of cooking methods. We simply washed out our fragrant pans the moment we had finished using them, hiding them where they would never be found.

Even in the rebellious 1970s this struck me as an unsatisfactory solution. I didn’t want to get away with things — I wanted to be vindicated. So I ‘hid’ my frying pan where Mrs Beddoes was bound to discover it. She looked at me sorrowfully and said she would have to confiscate it. Nothing personal, Mr Crow- maire , but rules were rules.

‘Just so, Mrs Beddoes. So why don’t we have a cuppa together and take a look at the book of rules?’

Of course I had given this document at least as much attention as any piece of coursework. I waited for her to find the relevant passage. ‘ … Cooking activities involving frying are strictly prohibited. You see? I’m afraid I must take away that pan.’

I let her take the first few steps with my pan towards whatever pantry Valhalla she commanded, and then said, ‘Not so fast, Mrs Beddoes. Have you ever seen me frying anything in that pan?’

‘No, Mr Crow-maire, but rules are rules.’

‘Then show me where in the rules it says frying pan . I believe this college specialises in Law in a small way. It shouldn’t be difficult to get a professional opinion on the interpretation of these rules.’

‘Well, what else is a frying pan for, if not frying? Tell me that!’

‘For boiling, for poaching, for sousing in a maize-flour sauce, for simmering, for warming through. Do you not see, Mrs Beddoes, that this pan is the only one that is perfectly suited to the unfortunate shortness and curvature of my arms?’ I laid it on thick till she was thoroughly flustered. By and large it’s easy to create a misleading impression of exactly what I can or can’t do. No one likes to question my say-so.

Tomorrow on Wittering Sunday

So I got my pan a reprieve, and my revenge on the rules. Revenge, despite the proverb, not best served cold but sautéed, and so hot it burns the tongue.

In a certain sense I got my come-uppance shortly afterward. There was no carpet on the common spaces of Kenny staircase and the parquet was slick. One day I had fried up a storm and then washed up as usual. I was scooting briskly along with the incriminating pan when I must have fallen forwards. I say ‘must have’ because a blow to the head interferes with the sorting office — the mechanism which processes short-term memories into long. My brain hadn’t yet decanted that thimbleful of information into the proper tank, and so it spilled.

It was hardly surprising that I should have fallen out of the wheelchair. If your knees have no play in them you must punt yourself forwards in a precarious position, and if your arms aren’t very good at their job then you have very little chance of breaking your fall. My little frying pan was light, but it didn’t help.

So the college legend goes that I was found with my head in a frying pan of blood. This sounds wildly exaggerated, but then the blood vessels in the scalp can put on quite an alarming show. Scale down the horror, and it’s still a fairly startling sight to greet an inexperienced Spanish doctor assigned to Addenbrookes Hospital. It was a short ride in the ambulance. Old Addenbrookes was just the other side of the wall from A staircase, Kenny Court, Downing. Plans were well advanced to transfer it to a new site further out, but for the time being I had a hospital more or less en-suite .

Having seen the state of his patient, the doctor prepared a syringe of local anæsthetic. At this point I rejoin the narrative, speaking volubly. Consciousness resumed with a swirl of departing images. All I saw was a nice dark man with a hypodermic. I lunged for it to the best of my ability. He said, with the most enchanting accent, ‘You have had a fall. I am a doctor. This will make you feel better.’ I said, ‘I know all that. Hand it over.’ I hadn’t given up on grabbing the hypodermic, and made some sort of impaired dive for it.

The doctor was inhibited as we tussled, by the knowledge of his greater strength. He was shy of pressing his advantage.

He said, ‘Please let me do my job.’

‘But I know just what to do. This is Lignocaine, isn’t it? Just the right stuff to use. Well done. Are you Spanish?’

‘I am. Hold still, please.’

There are as many types of concussion as there are of consciousness. Mine was bossy and high-spirited. I didn’t want this handsome foreigner to think he was dealing with a standard-issue pig-ignorant xenophobic Brit. Even a university town is not free of such folk.

I spoke the first Spanish words that came into my head. ‘ Mañana Domingo de Pipiripingo ,’ I sang out, taking great care with the pronunciation, ‘ Se case Juanito con una mujer que no tiene manos y sabe coser …’

I could have done better with a bit of planning, but who plans for concussion? Telling a stranger that tomorrow on Wittering Sunday Juanito is marrying a woman with no hands who’s good at sewing , was no way to prove my command of my faculties.

I fell back on English. ‘Please give me the hypodermic. I’m quite capable of anæsthetising myself. I know where the pain is, don’t I? It’s my body, not yours.’

‘I’m not allowed. It breaks the rules.’

‘I won’t tell.’

He was being very unreasonable. He wanted to play doctor even more than I did. I won’t say he botched the injection, but it’s a fact that a local anæsthetic depends for its effectiveness on the concentration achieved at the nerve fibre. That’s why it’s called a local, for heaven’s sake! If he had let me do it I’m sure I would have scored a bull’s-eye. He was shaking his head so fiercely to discourage me that he didn’t quite get the needle in the right place, and a shed tear of Lignocaine dribbled its cold way down the side of my head. Spanish body language has its drawbacks.

After that my mood of omnipotence passed and I was content to let someone else put in the stitches. I’ve still got a little scar over one eyebrow, but I can’t say it bothers me particularly. Nor did I give up the unauthorised frying after my little mishap, though I was more careful when bowling along with an incriminating pan.

Anyway, that’s the story behind the legend which attached to me after that (The Hard-Core ‘Vegetarian’ Who Tried to Sneak a Black-Pudding Fry-Up When No One Was Looking). As if the blood in the pan had been on the menu all along.

As for other appetites, well … in some ways the twenty-year-old Cambridge undergraduate was very different from the twenty-year-old who had gone to India the previous summer, hell-bent on celibacy. I had learned that suppressing desires only leads to explosions lacking in any possible dignity. My new watchword was moderation rather than abstinence, but I had stumbled on to a rather promising definition of true moderation.