I'm cooking fish pie for Jenny, Sally and Kich tomorrow night, so I went to the fishmonger at lunchtime and picked up some ingredients. On my recce yesterday, I noticed that the smell of wet fish was intense, and it has worried me ever since.
How was I going to transport such a pungent cargo home?
The fishmonger took each of the - already sealed - fish pie platters I'd bought and wrapped them in individual polythene bags, which in turn were doublebagged in light carrier bags. This pass-the-parcel of poisson was then sealed inside my home-brought tupperware and pyrex dish, then inside another carrier bag, and then inside my canvas shoulder bag. Three layers of polythene, one of glass, one of plastic and one of canvas. Surely I'd be safe...
The bus was really hot - a converted coach with no windows that opened, the kind that once used to rely on air-conditioning to keep it cool, but these days without that just lets the students and the budget fare riders sweat. Simple chemistry, Brownian Motion, states that heat makes molecules - especially smell molecules - move around more. Not good.
But nothing happened. A student to the left of me bragged on about how they'd trashed their first year house.
"So Ste would just come into my room with a cup of coffee, and I'd be in bed, and he'd just pour it out on the floor. And then Malc would be, like, stamping in biscuits to it. Well funny!"
It sounded to me like his so-called friends were shits. A pregnant woman sat down opposite me with a box of veg and started examining the label of her coat. She got her phone out.
"Hey, yeah - I've got most of what we need, but I still need to pick up some milk... no, I'm okay, I am taking it easy... oh, and can you pick up some haddock too... we'll need it for the fish pie... I love you too."
She must have been puzzled by me, smiling at her all the way home. If my fish hadn't been wrapped so well, she might have been less confused.
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