Richard eats something strange

So the moral of the story most definitely is......oh wait, you haven't heard the story yet. Ok let's go back in time to Sunday evening.

Its been a long day moving the last of our furniture across to Bournemouth (yay!!) and I am on the car ferry from Southampton to East Cowes taking the van back. Sammy is at home unpacking and will leave to collect me from Southampton a bit later. The plan is to drop off the van and catch the Red Jet ferry back to her. But its dinner time and so I queue up along with a number of passengers to buy a nice hot meal on board the ferry. Lets not go into how it cost about a weeks wages to have dinner on a ferry. Bottom line is you are a captive audience, so I grin and bear it. There are lots of nice warm dishes to choose from, and the helpings to be fair, are pretty generous. I don't feel like fish and chips, and I don't feel like baked beans. Needless to stay lots of steaming hot plates of both are going across the pass to hungry passengers. I see the menu has a meatball option and the chaps ahead of me are served generous portions of the meatballs and veggies. Perfect, that's what I shall order then.

When its my turn I ask for meatballs and veggies, pointing at the big plate of meatballs in the Bain Marie. The lady serving the dinner does something very strange though. She asks me if I want meatballs or Faggots. Now for my Brit mates, the name Faggot is not used in SA unless you wish to be very very rude to people who are gay. For my gay friends, please know that I am only going with the facts here! Not too sure what to say I just point to the dish of meatballs and she serves them up. I happen to notice then that there is also a smaller dish with small meatballs in it. Hmmph, I chose well, the second lot of meatballs look like the ones you get at Spur for kids. In a word, small! As Sammy is not with me I choose a quiet table and whip out my laptop to do some work, and eat my dinner. The meatballs are very good, and have a nice onion and parsnip gravy with them. Delish. Something nags in the back of my head though, and I decide to Google "Faggots English food dish". Bad move!!!

It turns out that they are an old English dish made from offcuts of pig meat, pig offal mostly made up of pig heart, lung, liver, kidneys and whatever else they can find, wrapped in an intestine and cooked for a few hours. OMG....... The table next to me must have thought me soft, all green and seasick looking on such a calm evening on the water. Trying not to gag too much I waved frantically at the bus boy to come and take the food away from me. I swallowed the whole bottle of Diet Coke in about 5 seconds flat to wash any remnants of the dish out of my mouth, but now the gas is making me feel even worse. That will teach me a lesson! Somehow I managed to keep from losing my dinner, but I learnt a valuable lesson for people moving to another country.

Back to the moral then. It is simply, if the name of the dish is totally un-pc, then the ingredients probably are too. Ask before you eat. I think I may be off meatballs for a while, can't imagine why..........