343 • Take-away
‘Hi; this is your bartender, Barney.
So sorry: your chilli con carne
Has gone by mistake
To the shack of a Sheikh
Who’d only sent out for a sarnie.’
NOW BRING ME A LAMB BIRYANI.
Too work-obsessed to think of catering for himself, the rhymester receives the phone-call everybody dreads. Sadly his response – too spontaneously Wordsworthian to be constrained within his verse-form of choice – is merely a variation on the original impulse, to rely on carry-out: it is certain to lead to further disappointment.