CUPPA SOUPS

I had a cuppa soup today. It’s a sort of inevitability. Working from home means finding yourself in the kitchen opening and closing cupboard doors - it’s just the way of things. If Sammy wasn’t so good at hiding the snacks, I think I’d be in some degree of trouble.

Anyway, eventually one of those cupboard doors swings open to reveal packets of instant soup. And that day was today. Chicken noodle.

Who knows what French people make of cuppa soups. It’s powder in a sachet you pour into a mug, then stir with boiling water. Fine for your emergency travel kit. Lunchtime on a normal Monday in a fully working kitchen? The cuppa soup is to cuisine, what painting by numbers is to mathematics.

I poured in the hot water from the kettle. Tiny circular noodles danced in the swirling foam - a brownish liquid the colour of milky tea. Teaspoon in, give it a stir… liquid. Would it thicken? No. Is the debate about whether a cuppa soup is a drink or a soup over? I’d say so. This was watery slop with noodle life-rings, presumably desperate to get out of the abyss as they bobbed round the mug.

I drank it. There’s no spooning it up with a soup spoon or tipping it away from you like it’s vichyssoise. No the only thing you can do with this kind of slop is knock it back. It is in a mug after all. So I did. I drained it. I slurped it like a hot chocolate and then tipped the sunken soggy noodles down my throat. That’s protein I suppose. But so salty! Why is there so much salt in these things? It gives the impression of hot bilgewater, expelled into the sea by a ship’s pump. Salty, frothy and brown.

I had a pal at uni who lived off pot noodles. Paul his name was, but he looked so much like 90s Liam Gallagher, he ended up being called ‘Our Kid’. Nice guy, but always hovering round the kettle. I think about Our Kid sometimes, wondering what he’s up to. He was peaky by Christmas. And to be fair, he soon migrated away from the snack pots.

I’m going to have to have a word with Sammy I think; see if she can’t find a way to sanction and ration a few snacks. I say ration because, yes, I am the type of guy who’d chomp through two packets of Oreos in an hour. Absent-mindedly of course, persuading myself that they help me concentrate.

I can’t be glugging down cuppa soups all week.