The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Post-School Chicken and Mushroom Pot Noodle

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There are some statistics we may have wished to have recorded about our lives. Indeed some people do and every now again we see a scientist pop up and say that the average human sleeps for such-and-such a percentage of their lives. I’d love to have kept a record of the amount books I’ve read, and their titles, but I guess there comes a point when life’s just too short to count up these things. At any rate, there are also some statistics we wish never to be reminded of, and for me this stat would be the amount of Chicken and Mushroom Pot Noodles I consumed in my teenage years. I’m not proud of it, especially now we know what we know about UPFs, however my end of day routine was as follows: get the bus home, chat to Jason Starbuck who would disembark in Killyleagh, spend the last 20 minutes in blissful solitude looking out the window at the beautiful countryside through Shrigley etc, then disembark myself, walk up the drive, get a Pot Noodle out of the cupboard, boil the kettle, pour the boiling water over the Pot Noodle very carefully to make sure you didn’t make it too watery, and then apply the soy sauce, give it a mix, add more water if desired, and consume intermittently while playing some game on my brother’s Playstation, in his room. It would not be unusual for this to be accompanied with a bag of crisps, a pint of Robinsons squash, and some kind of chocolate like a Kit Kat. It’s only now in retrospect I think I could have made more of my adolescence…