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1982 (17 YEARS OLD)
The Shittest Burger In The World

The Shittest Burger In The World

1982 (17 YEARS OLD)3 weeks ago

1982 - 17 Years Old

Most of my friends could best be described as lazy fucks.

Cool. Funny. Loyal. All of them. Clever. Most of them. Dashing. One or two of them.

But lazy fucks, nonetheless.

So not a single one of them had a part-time job.

Certainly, by this time Tinkham and Smell were in the army and earning a wage, but nobody else had even a part-time job.

Except me.

I had a whole host of them.

That was the American-dad thing coming into play. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

For me, it represented freedom. My parents couldn’t tell me what clothes or records to buy, how I had my hair cut, when I could go out, or what girl I could take where.

Most of my friends sold away this lifestyle for 5 quid a week.

Sometimes less.

The downside was that my core group of friends could only go out once a week. Twice, if there was a party they could get away with entering with only two tins of crap lager.

And a weekend night out with the lads, when I was in between girlfriends, would end in one of three ways, ranked in order:

In first place, meeting a new girl, dazzling her with my rapier wit to the point that she let me walk her home and snog with her just out of sight of her house’s windows. Until the downstairs lights came on.

In second place, almost running home because my parents had put on their once-every-six-weeks dinner party. I’d get home, and the buffet and fridge would be filled with all sorts of lasagnas and pastas and enchilada casseroles. And homemade New York style cheesecake.

My mum was an awesome cook.

To be honest, the ranking of first and second place was a bit subjective. When I was getting my hands slapped away to the sound of giggles, meeting a new girl was definitely number one. But in the moment of tucking into a second slice of cheesecake…

Regardless, definitely in a distant third came having a burger from Sweeney Todd. That wasn’t his real name, of course, but he owned the hamburger van that would set up shop in the market square to catch all of the nearby pubs emptying out on a Friday and Saturday night.

Rumour had it that he spent a suspicious amount of time hanging around the local morgues.

The quality of the project would later be captured in Roddy Doyle’s 1991 novel The Van (and later in the film):

I love burgers. I’ve had great burgers, and I’ve had so-so burgers. I would like to say “but I’ve never had a shit burger,” but Sweeney Todd took that away from me.

There was so much soy and so little meat in it that even Red Helen (a vegan, of course) wouldn’t have objected to it (the concept, not the taste).

But that’s purely academic, as nobody in history ever took a girl to Sweeney Todd’s.

Even Tim Markham, who had never spoken to a girl in all of his life, except maybe his mum, would have known better.

No, Sweeney Todd’s at 2 in the morning was the gathering place of inveterate losers and those of us going through a rough patch.

The one upside, was that a lad named Derek worked in the van. Finally, someone else who had a part-time job. We didn’t really know him, except for bumping into him at a disco or party occasionally. But what we did know is that he had incredible taste in music. He was a big fan of Be Bop Deluxe, who we only pretended to know until we did.

I’m not sure if Sweeney Todd was his dad or his uncle. I didn’t really care. But Derek controlled the music ( a cassette player hooked up with all sorts of wires to the van’s PA system).

He played some great tunes.

And it was there that I first heard Bill Nelson (going solo from Be Bop Deluxe) sing Do You Dream In Colour?

I went out and bought it the next day.

So there we’d be, standing in the wee hours of the morning, 10 pints worse for wear, eating a burger that most of us would throw up on the walk home.

Listening to the likes of Bill Nelson.

But wishing instead to be snogging or eating cheesecake.