A Fear Of Porridge

'You've done it again, haven't you? Look at the size of these spuds, they were ten times this size when you put 'em in. You've reduced a bag of Maris Pipers to a bowl of marbles.'

Malcolm looked decidedly sheepish, and did his best to muster some sort of defence.

'Well, it's not my fault, chef. I can't do two things at once. I loaded the spud peeler and set it going and then Tony asked me to take him in a new sack of onions, sharpish. Said he wanted to start the chicken curry.'

Louis, the head chef, rolled his eyes and stomped out of the store room carrying the bowl of miniature potatoes Malcolm had just created. The rotating drum usually needed no more than a minute, but he'd left them in for at least five, and they had been almost scoured out of existence. He went back into the kitchen and prepared himself for whatever was about to greet him in the huge galvanised sink.

'Crack on with that lot Malcolm, we'll need some of the bigger pans for today's lunch menu,' grinned Tony, knowing full well what had just happened on the potato front.

Malcolm's heart sank as he arrived at the sink and witnessed what was waiting for him. It resembled the aftermath of a torpedoed cargo ship: pans, ladles, strainers, whisks and bowls of every size lay half-submerged in a toxic, greasy mire. His eyes searched frantically for survivors, but worst of all, for his nemesis, the porridge pan. Cavernous, intimidating, and lined in a thick layer of burnt porridge, it lay on its side, half submerged, like a motionless crocodile bristling with evil intent.  

'Bloody hell, Tony. What's the point of just chucking everything into the sink like this. I'll only have to fish it all out again to drain all this gunge away. Why can't you all just stack everything on the draining board?'

'Far too busy for that, Mally. We had a hundred and thirty breakfasts this morning, and all before eight thirty. Now stop whinging and crack on, we've got lunch to prepare and only an hour and a half to do it in.'

Malcolm sighed and put on the thick rubber gloves that looked as if they were designed to handle radioactive isotopes; ominous, glossy black, and disturbingly sticky on the inside. He fished out the porridge pan and stared at the hopelessness of the task awaiting him, marvelling at the way in which chefs in this kitchen could transform oatmeal and milk into the most tenacious, unrelenting, bloody minded substance known to man. 

He briefly considered writing to Michelin. Not about restaurants, but to ask whether their tyre people had ever considered porridge-welding. But then Malcolm had many such fanciful ideas as he spent his eight-til-two shifts bent over the hotel's tank of horrors, thinking quixotic thoughts. It was only a holiday job, he kept telling himself, but a week in this kitchen could seem like an eternity.

'You're always like this, when I'm like that,' chirped the ever cheerful voice of Mr Pledger, as he entered the kitchen buttoning up his chef's coat. His theatrical entrance at this time every Wednesday delighted everyone present, making the day far more bearable with his energy and kindness. Once head pastry chef on the Queen Mary and now retired, he came in once a week to produce the most epic vanilla slices and chocolate eclairs ever created by a mortal. 

'Ah, Malcolm,' he cried, instantly recognising the boy's sorry plight. 'Overcoming impossible odds again, I see. And without a life jacket too. Well done my boy. Well done!'

Malcolm beamed from ear to ear as Mr Pledger's playful accolade instantly washed away his anguish and set his quirky mind into motion. Malcolm loved inventing new words, and a new one had just arrived in his in-box.....confectious. Anyone capable of making pastries so gorgeous while infecting everyone around him with happiness could only be described as confectious.

He set about his task with renewed vigour and after just half an hour's brisk aquatic activity, he had cleansed and despatched everything in the sink, with the exception of the porridge pot of course, which now sat on the draining board soaking. 

He peered into it, clinging to the faint hope that soaking might succeed where physics had failed, but the same spectacle awaited him. A geological layer, resembling chopped coconut matting, coal-mine black and welded to the base with a ferocious disregard for chemistry, cookware, or human despair.  

Tony, returning from the fridge with a tray of chopped chicken, peered down into the murky depths. 

'Looks like the goal mouth at Villa Park in '76,' he grinned. 'Like Passchendaele it was. Ipswich's goalie dived to stop a header from Andy Gray and was never seen again.'

'It's not funny, Tony. How the hell am I supposed to get that off?' pleaded Malcolm. 

'You could try the Samaritans,' he replied, with his trademark grin. Their number's by the phone on the wall.'

'He's always like this, when you're like that,' quipped a jovial voice from the pastry table.

In an atmosphere now far too light-hearted for rants about porridge pans, Malcolm had little choice but to plunge his wooden spatula into the depths and begin scraping.

Every now and then a crusty flake surrendered to his determination and floated aimlessly for a while, before sinking back into the abyss. Malcolm switched into auto pilot as he scraped, and began to let his mind drift in search of more new words. Words that might describe the fear of porridge and its sadistic consequences. Something like panxiety, he thought, resulting in oatrage, or even in severe cases, acute oatastrophe.

Malcolm had very quickly come to realise that kitchens, like most frantic places, ran less on gas than on hope. Hope that the breakfast rush would soon end. Hope that lunch wouldn't be quite as chaotic as yesterday. Hope that the day's deliveries arrived on time. Hope that nothing was ever sent back from the dining room by a dissatisfied diner. And, above all, from Malcolm's perspective, hope that porridge would one day be taken off the breakfast menu.