I’ve never mainlined heroin. It never really appealed to me. It always struck me as a way more ‘Trainspotting’ type drug than anything cool or glamorous. If cocaine was Studio 54 in its heyday, heroin was dirty syringes in the back alleys behind the club where the garbage and the homeless Scottish people were kept. But I always wondered why anyone would ever take their first ‘hit’ of something so horrendously addictive that your life, as you knew it, anticipated it, expected it to pan out, was over as of that very moment. And apparently the problem with heroin is that the first shot is so unbelievably amazing that you then spend all your time trying to get that same feeling which, apparently, is impossible.

I have a similar issue with doner kebabs. What? No, it’s NOT stupid, it’s a good comparison. Something that you know is really really bad for you but you can’t resist because it is so highly addictive. Thank you!

It’s the same thing, I am forever trying to have the feeling that was produced by the first kebab I ever ate. That taste.

It was 1975, the summer of. I was working for a mini-cab company in the West End, delivering stuff in my little mini. The office was literally underneath the Post Office Tower and I was concerned that it might fall down, because I wasn’t sure my car insurance covered me if I was carrying ‘goods’. Anyway, one lunchtime I walked into the office and was greeted by a smell so strong, so powerful, so absolutely wonderful, that it quite literally felt like I’d been punched in the face by an Algerian woman with a Y chromosome. I found out that what was being eaten by another driver was called ‘a ke-bab’, which sounded exotic, and was available, literally a 1-minute walk away. I went. I got. I bit…

And I can still remember that taste, the entire ‘wow!!!!’ as all those flavours exploded in my mouth. That restaurant was called Efes and was in Great Titchfield Street, where it had been for a decade before I discovered it and it lasted until about 10 years ago when, having already changed hands and ‘gone downhill’, it closed.

Part of me died. Is that a bit overly dramatic? For a kebab?? What you think??

Oddly, my old mate discovered Efes at about the same time, completely independently. It became something of an obsession. Although we’re talking a few times a year, rather than stealing our parents’ wedding rings to fund the habit.

He moved to France. And I’d get a call: “my flight lands at Heathrow at 4.50. I can be ‘there’ by 7”. There was no question where ‘there’ might be.

Obviously, I’ve had kebabs from many, many places. I was even taken in Los Angeles to try this ‘super new thing’ called a ‘giro’. But never has anyone produced a kebab to rival the ones Efes made.

And all this just because I had a kebab last night. From our local Turkish kebabery. And it was wonderful. I dripped down my arms, as they must do, it was filled with goodness and all taste. But was it ‘as good’? No, nothing is. As Crosby Stills and Nash sang so appropriately: “if you can’t be with the one you love; love the one you’re with”. Definitely works for kebabs.

So the quest goes on. And it’s such an enjoyable journey.

Happy Diet Day

A xxxx