it's 2012 and Mr Egg has been gutted: all the organs removed, all the surfaces sterilised. Mr Egg has been sanitised, modernised, gentrified, renovated. oh, the irony of sanitise as dirty word. no more will the sign outside hang: eat like a KING for £1.50! eat like a QUEEN for £2.50! they probably wanted to call it "perfectchickenhutdotcom!". to fill you in, Mr Egg is a long-standing chip shop in birmingham, famed for its garish décor, its mediocre cuisine, and known to everyone who has ever been shitfaced at 2am at the top of hurst Street, where birmingham's gay quarter, irish quarter and china town meet in a charming culturally confused trifecta.
who was mr egg? where did he come from? where was he going? why was he topless and dancing around with a hat and cane? now we will ever know. and they got rid of the giant decorative fried egg that used to droop from the ceiling, threatening to fall, like an infant-school parachute, over every shit-in-a-tray recipient in the room. it's the end of an eggy era. what the actual fuck.
i remember being hypnotized by that giant decorative fried egg on the ceiling once when i was 14, waiting for my friend to roll a spliff in his lap. i remember thinking how discrete we were being, even though we weren't, and i remember thinking about how grotty the air must have been to turn the white and yolk of this giant droopy egg the same homogeneous shade. the rest of the place was decorated a dim but bold yellow, coordinated with a classic greasy spoon dining table set-up. The egg-ufo that stuck to the ceiling - with its ripe, comical colour from years of absorbing airborne grease - was a vivid childhood memory. it had been my favourite part of the shop, but all that's gone now. that whole side of the room, where the customers would sit down to eat their chips and saveloys and pies under the sagging egg parachute, has been bricked up to halve the shop. you can't sit down any more. you can't zone out at the giant egg stuck to the ceiling. now it looks the same as any other chicken shop, with the glaring LEDs of new management.
i noticed all this one night after a shift at the comedy club, pouring people their saturday night pints. Mr Egg is reputable enough that an in-joke has developed between some of the comedians, urging them to crack one about it in their set. it always gets a big laugh from the locals. by the time i finished it was 3am and the only thing i'd eaten that day was a few after-work drinks, so in search of elusive midnight munch, i followed the bright lights of the junk-in-a-bucket vendors.
i cross over at the hippodrome to the new Mr Egg, but it's just closing. the man behind the counter is trying to get rid of stock and offers me some dead battery chicken with fries for £4 and i tell him wtf and what happened to me eating like a king for £1.50? what happened to the all you can eat egg buffet? upon seeing the gaunt, sleep-deprived face looking back at me, i sympathise briefly with this man, contemplating that this is probably all he's been hearing ever since he started work here, and equally, that he probably doesn't give two shits about the drunken opinions of chip-shop devotees. he waves his plastic chip-scoop around in the air like he's trying to turn me into an egg with his fatty plastic wand, motioning towards the window that dixi chicken across the road is cheaper. i was so disappointed. that was going to be the last time i ever went in there.
so i head over to dixi chicken and get a face-full of restaurant ventilation stink rising through the rest of the pollution as i weave between horny taxis. you can always smell when there's a fried chicken shop in the area, can't you? it's in the air - the clouds of grease. that's why it's mostly a nocturnal affair - so no light can illuminate the yellow fog that drifts through our midnight midst, filming our faces in unctuous mist. i look up at dixi chicken: an establishment that ranks pretty low in a highly competitive list of fast-food lows. i look up, eyes meeting with the cartoon hen of its logo, its red baseball cap tipped back, winking at me. adding insult to injury, it's smiling too, giving me the thumbs up, reassuringly. you gotta love that. it used to be all about kebabs, but they never showed happy sheep, i don't know why. people love the happy chickens though. it was in london i first saw this wave of fried-chicken fried-chicken fried-chicken approaching. that trendy wave burst the banks of the M25 and soon moved north to hit our brummie lack-of-shores. i consider a veggie burger so as to avoid the fowl genocide.
as i step up the curb to get inside, a large slap-head of a security guard emerges out of the dark to hold the door for me, flexing a fluorescent bicep bangle with his I-D held within it. this thinly-veiled fascist irks me before i've even clocked the bulldog tat. as i move to the counter i know he's checking me out; weighing up what sort of threat i might potentially pose; gauging how easily he could take me. that's what security do all day. they check everything out. they watch everyone entering the space to be secured and consider who is going to cause them problems. they're usually right. that's their job. they keep an eye on things. that's what this guy was doing. he was keeping an eye on me. i could feel it.
you fuckin' fuck, i react to his silent judgement, already feeling violated by his eyes in the back of my head. i bet he doubles up as a self-righteous bailiff in other hours, i go on, judging him back. a lot of security thugs will work a couple of different jobs. bouncer and bailiff is common combo. one of the bouncers at the comedy club moonlights as a bailiff. says he loves his job. cunt. he gets off on the intimidation. knocking on people's doors in the night. destroying people's lives as a matter of occupation. god, now it's flipped: i've half-turned to get a better look and can't stop staring at him. i'm trying to read his criminal record in the folds of his face, wondering if ever he got carried away dealing with a situation - got too excited and did someone in - having to carve them into small pieces, coat them in delicious southern style seasoning and give them a go in the deep fat fryer. maybe they're all complicit. very good, my friend. good price. lovely-lovely.
i'm getting ahead of myself. more important than the origins of steak burgers and popcorn chicken is the question: when did fast food franchises start getting security guards? is this the world we live in? is this the direction the future is headed? to streets on lock down in case someone starts shooting up the neighbourhood in a flurry of rage sparked by a missing portion of bbq beans? or else gangs of lads start jacking family buckets at knife point in moments of desperate drunken heroism? are our binges really so lairy as to need armies of paramilitary dinner-ladies to supervise our eating habits?
it might just be me blowing things out of proportion - underestimating the inevitable societal backlashes and projecting small-time escalations into apocalyptic cataclysms - i don't know. maybe it's just my paranoid imagination getting carried away. then again, the metropolises in which civilisation has suppurated already bear every weeping sign of farce. sometimes i think the only reason we don't already consider absolute meltdown to have occurred is because we've grown up with it. because we only live for 70 odd years - just enough time to glimpse the abyss and then pop our alienated little clogs. if that's too grim for you, another vision is that our chicken trough establishments grow tamer as our generations grows older, our kids frowning on the sleaze of our dietary choices. Perhaps in future, fried chicken shops will inherit the social function that greasy spoons once held, replacing the purple-rinse nattering venues of instant coffee and brown sauce, with cans of nondescript energy drink and tiny plastic pots of chilli-mayo.
i noticed all this one night after a shift at the comedy club, pouring people their saturday night pints. Mr Egg is reputable enough that an in-joke has developed between some of the comedians, urging them to crack one about it in their set. it always gets a big laugh from the locals. by the time i finished it was 3am and the only thing i'd eaten that day was a few after-work drinks, so in search of elusive midnight munch, i followed the bright lights of the junk-in-a-bucket vendors.
i cross over at the hippodrome to the new Mr Egg, but it's just closing. the man behind the counter is trying to get rid of stock and offers me some dead battery chicken with fries for £4 and i tell him wtf and what happened to me eating like a king for £1.50? what happened to the all you can eat egg buffet? upon seeing the gaunt, sleep-deprived face looking back at me, i sympathise briefly with this man, contemplating that this is probably all he's been hearing ever since he started work here, and equally, that he probably doesn't give two shits about the drunken opinions of chip-shop devotees. he waves his plastic chip-scoop around in the air like he's trying to turn me into an egg with his fatty plastic wand, motioning towards the window that dixi chicken across the road is cheaper. i was so disappointed. that was going to be the last time i ever went in there.
so i head over to dixi chicken and get a face-full of restaurant ventilation stink rising through the rest of the pollution as i weave between horny taxis. you can always smell when there's a fried chicken shop in the area, can't you? it's in the air - the clouds of grease. that's why it's mostly a nocturnal affair - so no light can illuminate the yellow fog that drifts through our midnight midst, filming our faces in unctuous mist. i look up at dixi chicken: an establishment that ranks pretty low in a highly competitive list of fast-food lows. i look up, eyes meeting with the cartoon hen of its logo, its red baseball cap tipped back, winking at me. adding insult to injury, it's smiling too, giving me the thumbs up, reassuringly. you gotta love that. it used to be all about kebabs, but they never showed happy sheep, i don't know why. people love the happy chickens though. it was in london i first saw this wave of fried-chicken fried-chicken fried-chicken approaching. that trendy wave burst the banks of the M25 and soon moved north to hit our brummie lack-of-shores. i consider a veggie burger so as to avoid the fowl genocide.
as i step up the curb to get inside, a large slap-head of a security guard emerges out of the dark to hold the door for me, flexing a fluorescent bicep bangle with his I-D held within it. this thinly-veiled fascist irks me before i've even clocked the bulldog tat. as i move to the counter i know he's checking me out; weighing up what sort of threat i might potentially pose; gauging how easily he could take me. that's what security do all day. they check everything out. they watch everyone entering the space to be secured and consider who is going to cause them problems. they're usually right. that's their job. they keep an eye on things. that's what this guy was doing. he was keeping an eye on me. i could feel it.
you fuckin' fuck, i react to his silent judgement, already feeling violated by his eyes in the back of my head. i bet he doubles up as a self-righteous bailiff in other hours, i go on, judging him back. a lot of security thugs will work a couple of different jobs. bouncer and bailiff is common combo. one of the bouncers at the comedy club moonlights as a bailiff. says he loves his job. cunt. he gets off on the intimidation. knocking on people's doors in the night. destroying people's lives as a matter of occupation. god, now it's flipped: i've half-turned to get a better look and can't stop staring at him. i'm trying to read his criminal record in the folds of his face, wondering if ever he got carried away dealing with a situation - got too excited and did someone in - having to carve them into small pieces, coat them in delicious southern style seasoning and give them a go in the deep fat fryer. maybe they're all complicit. very good, my friend. good price. lovely-lovely.
i'm getting ahead of myself. more important than the origins of steak burgers and popcorn chicken is the question: when did fast food franchises start getting security guards? is this the world we live in? is this the direction the future is headed? to streets on lock down in case someone starts shooting up the neighbourhood in a flurry of rage sparked by a missing portion of bbq beans? or else gangs of lads start jacking family buckets at knife point in moments of desperate drunken heroism? are our binges really so lairy as to need armies of paramilitary dinner-ladies to supervise our eating habits?
it might just be me blowing things out of proportion - underestimating the inevitable societal backlashes and projecting small-time escalations into apocalyptic cataclysms - i don't know. maybe it's just my paranoid imagination getting carried away. then again, the metropolises in which civilisation has suppurated already bear every weeping sign of farce. sometimes i think the only reason we don't already consider absolute meltdown to have occurred is because we've grown up with it. because we only live for 70 odd years - just enough time to glimpse the abyss and then pop our alienated little clogs. if that's too grim for you, another vision is that our chicken trough establishments grow tamer as our generations grows older, our kids frowning on the sleaze of our dietary choices. Perhaps in future, fried chicken shops will inherit the social function that greasy spoons once held, replacing the purple-rinse nattering venues of instant coffee and brown sauce, with cans of nondescript energy drink and tiny plastic pots of chilli-mayo.
God bless you, Mr Egg!
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