En Passant: The ordinary now luxury

SAMUEL Johnson, Dr Samuel Johnson nogal, was an English Man of Letters about whom I know absolutely nothing. If you ever studied English literature you will have heard of him because, among things, he was a poet, wrote essays and compiled a dictionary of the English language.

As I understand it, he was born in the early 1700s and died about 75 years later of, it has now been more or less ascertained, Tourette Syndrome, a disease about which I also know nothing.

My only encounter with a Tourette Syndrome sufferer (at least, everybody said it was Tourette) was in a market street in south London in 1982, so it certainly wasn’t Dr John- son. In fact it was in Lower Marsh Road near Waterloo Station.

I was working in a bottlestore in Lower Marsh Road, and the street was taken over daily by barrows, stalls and blokes selling things from the back of a van. Among the goods sold were vegetables, but there was a lot of other stuff too.

So, at the end of each day there were usually lots of old limp cabbage leaves all over the street, plus other vegetable off-cuts and vegetable waste and all sorts of other refuse, and to sweep it all up there was this man.

I don’t know if he was hired by the council or the stall holders, but he’d start at one end and sweep the street. But every now and then he’d put his head back and at the top of his voice yell, “F*** off, f*** off, f*** off”, about three times, and all the stall holders would nod and smile and say, “There goes old Percy again”, and then they’d carry on selling and Percy (or whatever his name was) would carry on sweeping.

Now, some said it was Tourette Syndrome, but I did hear also that Percy was shot up in a tank during World War II and lost his mind as a result. Mind you, I did once work with a rum character in Eshowe, who also used to put his head back occasionally and let rip, but he didn’t vloek. No, he used to crow like a rooster, and his outbursts used to co- incide with the phases of the moon. It’s true! Like a flippen rooster!

Why am I telling you all this? Ah yes, Samuel Johnson…

The only thing I do know about Samuel Johnson was that he was very fond of his cats (or it may have been one particular cat), and he used to feed his cat(s) oysters. The thing is, see, back in the 1700s, oysters were considered to be poor people’s food, really poor people’s food, and apparently, to save his servant the embarrassment of having to go out and ask for oysters at the shops, Johnson used to go out to the shops himself to buy oysters for his cat(s).

And why am I telling you this?

Well, it occurred to me that there are some things that used to be considered poor man’s food that are now becoming luxuries. I mean, try ordering a dozen oysters at a restaurant in Umhlanga Rocks.

Perhaps it’s not as bad as lobster, which now requires that you have major surgery to remove an arm and a leg to pay for one, whereas it was once, in the early days of Canada, considered poor man’s food. People who had to resort to eating lobster used to bury the shells in their back- yards so that the neighbours, let alone the dustmen, did not see how poor they were.

Lobsters were so plentiful that I have read that they were fed to prisoners and slaves as a staple, and used as animal feed and even as fertiliser. There is even a record of slaves in Massachusetts suing their masters because they were so gatvol of damned lobster, and they won their case. It was ruled that they should not be fed lobster more than three times a week.

Caviar too used to be something that did not require surgery to eat. I don’t know how much it costs now (or even if you can get it in our Vryheid supermarkets), but once upon a time the pubs in the USA used to give caviar away for free, just like some pubs have peanuts on the bar. The saltiness, they hoped, would make their patrons drink more.

And then think of chicken wings. Years ago butcheries couldn’t give them away, and in the days that people had a fowl run at the bottom of the garden and used to slaughter a chicken for Sunday lunch, the wings would quite often end up in the soup with the feet, gizzard, heart and liver.

Then some enterprising chap, thought, What a waste, called them (for reasons I cannot fathom) “buffalo wings”, and now you pay an arm… well, not quite, maybe a finger or two, to eat something that is 50% bone. Gram for gram, I bet buffalo wings are more expensive than chicken breasts.

But worse than all that, and with winter approaching, when you want to tuck into something more hearty than an egg-white-only omelette, have you seen the price of an ox tail? Ox tail used to be affordable, and if you consider than an ox tail is probably only, at most 50% meat (the rest being bone and sometimes fat), then its probably, gram for gram, more ex- pensive than fillet!

I wonder what Samuel Johnson would make of that.