POP-UP TRUCKS

Even the rain wasn't enough to suppress the awful smell of the pop-up Korean burger van today.

It's acrid like fumes, yet somehow still sticky and sweet-smelling - a toxic mix of sizzled, barbecued, battered gloop, steaming into the air and pervading through the damp drizzle.

I watched as people came back smiling under their hoods, carrying cardboard trays of towered burgers and chips. I felt sick.

Here's my thought: forget conventional weaponry in contentious military operations, let's send in the pop-up Korean burger van instead.

Oh not just one, rumbling over the sands of Afghanistan! A whole fleet, a caravan of chicken-battering, meat-sizzling pop-up-Korean burger vans infiltrating the last hideouts of the Taliban, or whoever else it is we're fighting these days.

They'll be screaming out of the Tora-Bora caves and laying down their weapons in no time, their eyes watering and their nostrils flaring with the potent stench of deep-fried buttermilk and barbecue gunge.

Oh and there'd be no need to worry about North Korea! The rolling pop-up trucks would fit right in to the Pyongyang Nuclear Development and Volleyball Complex where they'd unfold their plastic gazebos, slip on their aprons and get grilling the sloppy gloop, ready to knock out all the flat-topped scientists who've been chained to their laboratory work-benches.

The program would grind to a halt in a single lunch-time, or at least before the president can lift a pair of heavy binoculars to figure out what's happened anyway.

Soon the Americans will want to be in on it, cooking up their own blend of noxious fried meat and shipping it into conflict situations. They'll test it in the Nevada desert, shortly before President Business tells the Russians exactly how they did it.

Well, anyway. I stood in the lobby, watching the rain rolling the down windows, unable to go outside. I don't know why people eat that stuff.

In the end, I went back to my desk and ate my sandwiches.