Butter your bacon, eggs, onion, pastry into joy
Want pleasure? No. I take that back. I start again. Want joy? That’s better. So much better that I’ll repeat it. Want joy? Course you do.
(Notice how I’m leaving the little words out? Words like of, and do. Course you did. And admired it. So modern, you thought.)
I start again. Want joy? Course you do. Everyone does. Joy’s good.
Without joy, well, what’s the point of going on? We’ve grown up now and we no longer imagine we’re pleasing God. So there’s nothing we ought to do. There’s only what we choose to do.
And the purpose of what we choose to do might as well be joy, because aiming for anything else (a slab of tedium please, medium rare, with misery on the side) seems dumb when joy is on the menu.
So, I start again. Want joy? Then try this. I did and got joy. Not a tsunami of joy, but a ripple of it, of joy detectable, joy undeniable. And any joy’s better than none. Here’s how.
Haul open the fridge. See bacon. See eggs. Think bacon and eggs and droop with the drear of it.
How often have you succumbed to the imaginationlessness of bacon and eggs?
It’s like photocopying the Sistine Chapel instead of painting your own. So paint your own. You don’t live forever. You may as well try. What’s the worst that can happen? If you fail? Well, you fail.
But screw your courage to the sticking place (however that is done and whatever the sticking place may be – and if it sticks why the need for screwing? Ah the sweet mysteries of Shakespeare) and you’ll not fail.
(On reflection, photocopying the Sistine Chapel may not be quite as straightforward as my usage implied, but you knew what I meant so on we go. Indeed on we go is the motto of this essay, for time is marching even as I write and even as you read and if we do not use that time to make a little joy then it has gone and that is that. Not that it matters of course, but a waste’s a waste.)
So, you have bacon and you have eggs. Surely you owe it to to the poor dead pig to make joy of its flesh if you can. Ditto to the heirless chook. Well, here’s how. Summon the dog and drive to the supermarket and buy a. onion b. pastry c. ersatz parmesan Why those things and only those things? I wish I could explain. But sometimes heaven speaks and sometimes it does not and this time I heard heaven plain.
‘‘One onion,’’ heaven said, ‘‘some sheets of pastry (puff), and ersatz parmesan.’’
(I loved the way that heaven added ‘‘puff’ in brackets. Without it I might have ended up with short crust or even, heaven forbid, mille feuille. But heaven forbade.)
‘‘Thanks, heaven,’’ I whispered at the checkout and straight back home I drove with onion, puff and ersatz and an interested dog.
Fry bacon. Fry onion. With butter. (There is no other way to fry, of course, but the sadsack anti-butter lobby has grown strong so I take any chance to jab a finger in its joyless puritan eye).
Line the pie dish that you haven’t got with pastry. If the sheet’s too small add another. Join them with presses of the finger tips, like a potter.
Tip fried onions and bacon onto the pastry. Waste none of the butter, none of the bacon fat.
Cut crumbling ersatz parmesan and scatter – what’s the adverb? I know – liberally. Now crack half a dozen eggs atop. If the yolks break, they break. It doesn’t matter. Leave it to the godlessness of chance. And then, on noting you have half a sheet of puff remaining, let inspiration come to you and slice it into strips and lay it like a lattice on the egg-drenched onions, bacon and the ersatz parmesan.
Then paint the lattice with beaten egg (as you do so, you become your mother 50 years ago, all aproned and singing along to forgotten tunes on the bakelite radio you haven’t got.)
Cook it. At oven temperature. For the length of two beers and a game with the dog.
Then open the oven, duck the belch of steam and as it clears behold the bronzed and perfect lattice of a pie that looks medieval in its excellence.
And in that single moment, as the fine rich thing emerges, feel a ripple, as I promised, of that quality that gets yet more elusive with every passing day until whole weeks can pass without a hint of it, joy.
Sometimes heaven speaks and sometimes it does not and this time I heard heaven plain.