I was sent out to buy various items for dinner. Among these was a tin of water chestnuts. Never really seen the point of them. There’s something disconcertingly testicular about the water chestnut. Not just the shape, and colour, but that wince-inducing crunch. (Indeed I just now briefly wondered if they might be part of the orchid family - orchid being, as you know, the Greek for testicle… Alas, not.) But I had my instructions, and so off I cycled, determined to do my duty.
I was wandering up and down the aisle in Waitrose where they keep such exotica when I saw a tin of gigantes plaki - the 'big beans' on which I largely subsisted during a greek-island-hopping holiday in 1992. It was a year in which the Sirocco blew hard ... Anyway, I was remembering that I used to amuse my girlfriend back then by calling them 'beanoss humungoss', or other silly versions of the name, sometimes in the cringing, insinuating whine of Peter Lori, and sometimes in the voice of one of the Mexican peasants oppressed by the bandits in The Magnificent Seven.
And now, in Waitrose, I quietly did the voices again, before the beans in the World Foods aisle (it was fine, there was no one close enough to hear). It had the feel of a sacred rite in my own personal religion of memory and regret.
Then I resumed my search for the water chestnuts. Defeated in this, I sought out an assistant. I began to ask her where they might be, when I realised that I couldn't remember the name of the damn things. The only words in my head were 'beanoss humungoss'. I even stuttered a 'B-b-' before I stopped myself. In the end I replied to her polite enquiry with a defeated, 'It's nothing, nothing.'
I remembered the name 'water chestnuts' as I cycled home. 'Beanoss humungoss', I shouted at the traffic.