Mess Neutral

Last October I was going to write a post about eggs for British Egg Week. I didn’t quite gather my thoughts in time, so thought I’d put it off ’til Easter, which also came and went in the blink of an eye. I’ve decided I’m done with seasonal deadlines. Besides, I’m sure everyone was on such an albumen high after this year’s Egg Week that they probably needed a bit of time to come down.

But even after that decision, I found it hard to know where to begin. Every time I thought I had pinpointed the beginning of my egg fascination, I found trails leading farther and farther back into my undergrowth of half-remembered eggy anecdotes.

Maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, we are all ex-egg-dwellers, or maybe ex-eggs, or maybe both. Egg philosophy, like life itself, is brimming with such cyclical conundrums. The most famous, of course: what came first, the chicken or the egg? I like to think it was a tie, because I hate to see anybody lose.

So, like that guy that wrote that long series of books then died to get out of finishing them used to say, this isn’t the beginning, but it is a beginning.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 1 – AN EGG IS LAID

One day about ten years ago, I was round at Robert’s house at uni, waiting for something monumental and life-changing to happen. Then we watched Pink Flamingos.

It was fairly obvious that I would love this film: students are programmed to enjoy weirdness and I will never stop loving bowel movement-related humour. But there was something more going on. Where other people saw a deviant comedy about aspiring to be the flithiest person alive, we saw one of cinema’s greatest love stories. A pure-hearted romance between star-crossed lovers: Mama Edie, penned in her wicked daughter’s trailer, The Eggman, her suitor and would-be saviour. Maybe it’s more like Rapunzel than Romeo and Juliet, but I’m sticking with Shakey for a better egg pun caption.

Naturally, I have spent the last decade of my life looking for my eggman to sweep me into a wheelbarrow and whisk me off to a better life, but this never happened, so I became a lesbian.

Like with all self-discoveries, this egg-piphany has triggered great introspeggtion (I am going to hold off the egg puns now, don’t worry). I have come to believe that my id is an egg, but to find its origin requires swimming a few lengths up the fallopian tubes of the great chicken of life.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 2 – CAN’T BOIL THESE EGGS

The other great influence on my life, from a very early age, has been computer games. One day I may write My Life in Computer Games, which can’t possibly be as odd as this post. The very first game I played on anything more substantial than a Game and Watch was Chucky Egg on the BBC Micro at school. It was that game, in conjuction with Granny’s Garden, that started me down the questionable path that life has taken me. But what if, as well as opening the gateway to geekery, Chucky Egg had cracked the shell of another, more insidious influence?

Prime ovum and self-proclaimed King of the Yolkfolk, Dizzy was my anthropomorphic hero-of-choice on the Atari ST. While best known for puzzle platformers such as Treasure Island Dizzy and Fantasy World Dizzy, I had a soft-boiled spot for his Pac-man-esque outing, Fast Food. The player directed Dizzy around a sequence of outdoor mazes, hungrily gobbling up burgers, pizza and soft drinks, while avoiding getting devoured himself by various enemies. Power-ups came in the form of condiments, that unleashed certain effects that made the runaway fast food less, well, fast. I credit this game, with its nightmarish visions of evasive high-speed fried-chicken and a food-chain-gang gone wild with giving me enough mental resilience to side-step the eating disorders suffered by all the other girls at school.

Far removed from this constant threat of being scrambled, the Final Fantasy series chose to take a more nuturing view of egghood, making it central to gaining control of the recurring chocobo characters in many episodes of the franchise. Final Fantasy VII had a notoriously tedious/weirdly addictive chocobo breeding side-quest, that although technically peripheral to the main game, is integral to the whole RPG ethos of maximum time-consumption for dubious rewards.

This was taken to a new level with Final Fantasy XI, the series’ first online instalment, where it requires four whole real-life days of staring at an egg before so much as a hairline fracture, and a couple of months total before you can actually ride the blighter. I suppose it’s not much different from an in-game tamagotchi simulator. But there’s a reason that tamagotchis eventually tanked in popularity: they were fucking stupid.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 3 – SURE AS EGGS ARE EGGS

The truth is that I needn’t look so deep in my analysis of egg obsession. Because, you see, eggs are everywhere. Not just what we eat and where we come from, but how we speak. Is there another foodstuff that lends itself so often to idioms? You can be a good egg, a bad egg, a rotten egg. You can have an egg-head, a nest egg or egg on your face. You can egg someone on, tread on eggshells and put all your eggs in one basket. Just to name a few.

They can be a form of transport (per Lady Gaga’s ovoid sedan chair), housing, musical instrument or sex toy. I’m sure there are many varieties of egg porn if I dared to look – maybe Two Eggs One Basket?

I am not the only one consumed with all things egg – many ancient cultures believed that the whole universe was one giant egg. That’s a religion I can get on board with. Even the most important festival in Christianity has been co-opted by a lot of jiggery-eggery, which I can’t complain about, because Cadbury’s mini eggs are perhaps my favourite seasonal confectionary.

Long ago I envisioned collecting all of humanity’s egg experience into a masterwork of literature: The Ovossey. It would be part novel, part onslaught of egg-related facts. Such as: when General Franco was serving in the Spanish army in North Africa, he invited a fellow officer to dine with him who he considered cowardly.  He instructed his chef to serve his comrade mountains of eggs; in Spain huevos are slang for balls and he was implying the officer could do with some.

Alas, I was never to complete or even begin this oeuf oeuvre; reality hit, I got a job and life got boring. My dreams were as crushed as a fresh meringue beneath the buttocks of a failed Weight Watcher.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 4 – GOLDEN EGGS

It’s not just their metaphorical properties that are overwhelming, but the sheer joy of the physicality of eggs. Next time you open a box to hastily crack an egg or two into a pan, I ask you to pause for a moment, and consider that egg in your hand (if you are averse to real ova, I suggest getting the rubber variety from a National Trust gift shop of your choice, or ebay).

Let the egg nestle perfectly in the centre of your palm, feel how its shell pleasingly curves along the contours of your flesh. I am feeling relaxed just thinking about it. I am sure eggs are like an ovoid incarnation of the golden ratio, I can’t think of another form that looks and feels so right.

Believe me, my interest in the oviform is entirely innocent, though the same cannot be said for others. One of my all time favourite literary experiences was when Robert took me to the library one day and handed me a book to read. The library was silent back then, when mobile phones were still new enough that people didn’t think they had the right to keep them on everywhere. It was in this atmosphere of reverent silence that I dutifully read the first chapter of the book, seemingly a coming-of-age story about a boy and a girl, then happened upon the first line of the second chapter:

“That was the period when Simone developed a mania for breaking eggs with her ass.”

I jiggled as wildly as an egg in boiling water, but I kept it together and did not erupt out loud with laughter. The book was Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille, which regularly makes must-read lists, and I can heartily recommend for the whole family.

Perhaps the best thing of all about eggs is their plentiful nature. There is no rarity – eggs for all! Why some of us can even make them, as evidenced when one pops out every month, heralded by a crimson fanfare. I am not sure what those tiny sort are good for, but I hear the NHS is so enamoured they’re upping what they’ll pay for them.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 5 – HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR EGGS?

I’m not going to talk about the multitudinous ways to cook with eggs because, really, there are as many ways to cook eggs as there are personalities and also I’m shit at cooking. All I will say is that everyone should eat them, because that’s what Shirley Conran told me. I understand that vegans may object to this, but I’m not sure I fully understand why. After all, chickens keep laying all these unfertilised eggs, surely it’s our duty to spare them the emotional scarring of endless phantom pregnancies? Obviously, I only advocate buying the free-est of free range eggs with nauseating pictures on the box of multiple generations of the family that farmed them, who are so nice to chickens that that guy probably mistook the one on his knee for his own son.

When it comes to the pinnacle of haute oeuf cuisine, there’s only one contender. A creation so grand in scope that I took a 400-mile diversion to go and see it, forget Saturday Kitchen’s two-egg omelette, I’m talking about the 5027-egg omelette at this year’s Giant Omelette Celebration, in Abbeville, Lousiana.

If 5027 sounds like an strange number, that’s because they started off with 5000, then add another egg each year, ensuring it’s always going to be bigger and better. The omelette-making was quite a spectacle, but just one of many egg-themed events that took place over the weekend celebration. Possibly my favourite was the tractor egg-cracking competition (where you had to reverse a 1950s John Deere into an egg and try and make the smallest crack possible). I made a promising start on my attempt, managing to touch the egg without cracking it, however, I overshot it on my retry, resulting in a messy eggy double-tap.

I was in good company on the tractor, featuring several local beauty queens, a priest and a Grammy award-winner. The priest narrowly lost out in the end, but I think the biggest losers numbered in their dozens.

MY LIFE IN EGGS EPITAPH – EGG-NOG

I was going to finish this post with a short story entitled A Very Short Story About a Very Large Egg, but I decided to do a poem instead, because rhyming is fun, also it could be sung to children to give them nightmares about the end of the world.  Maybe this will be the first in a series called Apocalyptic Nursery Rhymes.

I looked back with no sense of mirth
To see the space where once was earth
To glimpse the ruins that remain
Of our great blue and green terrain

Or floating fragments of the crust
Where we once stood with faulty trust
So obssessed with climate change
But blind to what was really strange

From ancient rumblings in Minoa
Vesuvius and Krakatoa
Right to Eyjafjallajökull
There’s something geological

That hints at our bleak ruination
Each earthquake rends a new striation
Too late did our great minds begin
To see the cracks came from within

Volcanic belches boil and flare
Bright in the incendiary air
The fuse lit on this powder keg
Our primed, explosive giant egg

A scaly creature shaking loose
Its albumen of magma juice
And bursting through its birthing gates
That we’d known as tectonic plates

The crack felled a world population
Except for us out on this station
Now we seek somewhere new to dwell
As dustmites on a frail egg shell

If Hollywood makes a disaster film about the Earth really being a giant space-dragon egg that starts cracking and kills us all, I am suing.

BUT WAIT!

You don’t think I’m ending the world’s-longest-post-about-eggs without one more treat, do you? I think I’ve already shown this video to anyone that is likely to read this, nevertheless, it bears rewatching.

Ok, I think I’m spent. Only comments with bad egg puns allowed.