It just might be that the never-popular tales of the residents of the tacky suburb of Wellminstow may return to the blogosphere. How would that be?

Yesterdays of their lives - Claudio (iv)

An ex-colleague of Claudio's also worked on the local paper and alerted the Health and Safety Department of the council to Claudio's revolting practices in the kitchen with particular regard to how he dealt with diners who offended him. Under cover as a pastry chef, the Health and Safety Officer spent a few trial evenings in the kitchen. This is an excerpt from his report.

'Chef Claudio Diego Cardinale, proprietor of Beef Brasserie arrived in the kitchen shortly after the assistants had opened up and put out the evening's food and said to me, "We gon' have a little fun tonight, I looked at the reservations book and there's some fackin' preeeeeeeek here at half eight what I really, really hate. You wanna know why I hate him? I tell you why, that man, he don' like my Maraschino Mustard Sauce I put it on the Koi Carp he ate las' time."

'I said nothing and carried on rolling out Pampastry ("Pastry from the Pampas") for the evening's special, Smoked-Out Armadillo en Croute.

I then witnessed Cardinale sneeze over a meringue as he walked to the main stove. While he was cooking I noticed him on several occasions reach into the front of his trousers and scratch himself. "Aaah, you gotta sort out your prime Argentinian beef and two hairy veggies, innit," he said on each occasion.

It was later pointed out to him that the diner in question had arrived and ordered the special. "Ay Ruben, (he called me Ruben although I had been taken on under the name of Robin) you got that Pampastry all flat and everyfink innit, I got a special ingredient for my friend out there you wet yourself when you see this matey." Cardinale then, in full view, and ostentatiously, as if for my amusement, inserted his forefinger into his backside and wiped it on the pastry several times before adding the armadillo meat and baking it.'

This undercover eyewitness report was easily enough to have The Beef Brasserie closed down forthwith; the episode was written up in the 'Independent' under the headline 'The Faecal Finger of Fate'.

Yesterdays of their lives - Claudio (iii)

Beef Brasserie flickered, then quickly caught fire in the imagination of the locals, who felt that for King's Cross, what was in effect a gourmet greasy spoon was perfect. And for Claudio the great thing was that the clientele were, to a man, muckier in both theory and practice than he was. Which is saying something.

Before too long, diners from more salubrious quarters of town were attracted to the Beef Brasserie by patronising articles by those knuckle-scraping writers in such vibrant London magazines as Take Time and City Unlimited, along the lines of this, appended to a café review one February:
'Roll up your trousers and wear your highest heels when you dare to cross the threshold of Argentine meat chef Claudio Diego Cardinale's quaint little café-restaurant in King's Cross and you will be richly rewarded: rich in the sense that the Beef Brasserie's fare is rather more than rich, although artery-clogging is perhaps too steep a description. However, our correspondent removed the clothes-peg from her nose long enough to taste a manful Macaroni Mince as a starter, Beef Buenos Aires as main, served with fried egg as the vegetable, and pecked briefly at the Dessert of the Day, Beef Tallow Flan, all for just a little more than the cost of a couple of copies of Vogue. Argentine wine is wonderful these days, and we hope that Mr Cardinale one day has the good sense to import some into his cellars - it goes so much better than brown ale with strong, macho beefy dishes, which is what you get here in spades - and spadefuls.'

Cuisine paysanne in King's Cross? That's what the good burghers of well-heeled Hampstead and trendy Shoreditch latched onto, and as they began to beat a path to the slightly warped door of the Beef Brasserie and fill it with braying conversations about politics, and issues, and fashion, Claudio began to put up his prices. Which meant the locals could no longer afford to eat there, and were forced to get their regular fix of serious meat from the many kebab shops in the area (and in general they found, after having become accustomed to Claudio's way with tallow, that kebabs seemed like Lean Cuisine).

Claudio found that fame, no matter how minor, cut into his life with two edges. It was good for business, and it meant that his conception of food was popular; but it filled his little restaurant with loathesome people. And, if there is such as thing as a triple-edged sword, then there was a third cut - his success bred jealousy…

Yesterdays of their lives - Claudio (ii)

After Claudio's summary dismissal from the Covent Garden Catering College for running courses in Cannibal Cookery and Cooking with Grease, he found himself in a difficult position. The thing was, for the first time in his life, he'd been doing something that stopped the dribble from trickling out of the corner of his slack-jawed, constantly ajar mouth; something that made him want to get out of bed before noon; something that he liked to do but didn't have to do. That was the difficult part to accept. He had plenty of his father's money left, and all he had to do was to threaten to come home and take up residence in the family home once again for another massive wad of wonga to wend its way to the nearest Banco Popular de Buenos Aires. Claudio didn't have to cook, or do anything, for a living, yet here he was wanting to charge into a huge overheated kitchen and start barking out orders and getting the evening's special ready and insulting diners who complained about fluff or fag ash in the sauce. 'Listen matey, you don' like a bit of decoration on your food you fack off to Kentucky Fried, you get your chicken like your wife, hot breasts and greasy thighs innit?'

So using practically all of the tiny amount of cunning that was at his disposal, Claudio did indeed mention on the telephone to his parents that funds were a bit low and that maybe he would be on his way home before too long, and with Pavlovian certainty a fat dollop of money was ladled into his account in London, accompanied by a caring paternal message to stay there as long as he wanted, as long as he was enjoying himself, and funds would be available on request. Claudio put a deposit down on a disused fast-food joint under an arch behind King's Cross, and after a month of insulting workmen and catering suppliers, celebrated the grand opening of his first ever venture into the restaurant business: Claudio's Beef Brasserie.

Yesterdays of their lives - Claudio

You'll remember (probably far better than Claudio himself does) that this pampered young man came to England for an operation to remove a tiny particle of brain that was lodged in his skull. His obscenely rich father had slipped him a few months' spending money in order to keep him out of his life and in England during his recuperation period, and so Claudio shortly found himself a flat in London's glittering West End. Bored out of his tiny mind, he wandered the streets of London for days until one day he spotted a job advertisement in the window of the Covent Garden Catering College for a tutor. It was the work of a moment to equip himself with a pair of chef's trousers, a white coat and hat and to present himself before the college principal as London's only expert in Argentine Campfire Cookery. With London cuisine still riding on the crest of a Latin wave, Claudio's flimsily forged qualifications from the Fray Bentos Beef Braising Academy were taken as gospel and in two shakes of an ox tail Claudio was installed as a Speciality Chef.

Now I'm sure that he didn't mean to stray so far from the path, or should I say trail, of gaucho gastronomy. It's just that on the way back to his flat one evening, after about a month of teaching flame searing techniques and how to gut a steer and prepare it for consumption in the middle of the pampas, he walked under a leaky gutter. A few fat drops of water landed slap on the paper plate in his skull and within seconds his mind was racing ahead to the new syllabuses that he would put in place of Campfire Cookery.

So it was that a minor scandal hit the Covent Garden Catering College when it emerged at the end of the semester that two courses had been run, without the knowledge of the principal, in Cannibal Cookery and Cooking with Grease, subjects that were much closer to Claudio's heart than that campfire crap - he'd never been out of Buenos Aires onto the pampas, anyway, much less spent time around the flickering campfire with burly gauchos discussing lassoing techniques. No, he had wanted to inspire his students with recipes like Girlfriend in a Korma, Long Pig Pattie and Poached Bicep of Airsteward in an Andean salsa; and Suet Surprise, Rind Rissoles and Sugared Lard Pancakes a l'Huile de Carbon. Not that his students ever found work, except occasionally, later on, when Claudio opened his own restaurants. But they were tarred with the same brush as Claudio, and his very public naming, shaming and sacking meant that most of them were forced to retrain as undertakers.

Yesterdays of their lives - Miss Streatley

It's hard for me, the narrator, to write evenhandedly about Miss Streatley. That's because both of my hands aren't necessarily doing the same thing when I'm thinking about her. But I'll do my best to paint a truthful portrait of her, worts and all (her windowboxes are full of wild flowers like mugwort, bladderwort and St John's wort).

You'll know already about her penchant for long A-line skirts, her brown hair drawn tightly back into a bun, her steel-rimmed glasses and sensible shoes. You may not need reminding that she works in Wellminstow Public Library and lives in a small, well kept flat in Fenton Gardens. But you probably do not know that she never wanted to be a librarian, nor may you have ever mapped the circuitous route by which she arrived in Wellminstow.

Tabitha Streatley had, at the age of fourteen, run away to join the circus. As a young and preternaturally flexible teenager living in a chocolate-box West Country village there was little to do other than practise flickflacks and arabesques on village green for the amusement of a few strangely stunted and lethargic children (one of whom was a banjo prodigy and none of whom, contrary to certain beliefs about the genetic traits of the residents of such villages, had gills), Ned, a pudgy, middle-aged man with glasses and a greasy comb-over, who wore a duffle coat and who sat on the edge of the park bench and kept his navy nylon shopping bag clamped a little too firmly in his lap, and Gaston, the village idiot. Who happened to be her uncle. We can picture her with her hair in pigtails, her freckled face flushed from her exertions; she is barefoot, her charcoal grey school trousers rolled up to the knee and her white blouse covered in grass stains.

The day Tabitha Streatley disappeared from the tiny village of Much Sodding on the Marsh was a grey day indeed for her family. Her parents didn't find out until late in the day, when Tabitha's euphonium teacher, Mr Stroud, called them to say that she had not turned up for her lesson. He had been privately worried that his predilection for gazing at her as she laboured over her arpeggios and murmuring 'Big lungs' had somehow been misinterpreted by his pupil. Who was his cousin. And who had her own views about what 'tonguing' meant. Tabitha's parents had put the phone down and asked Ned, who often came round to the Streatley's cottage overlooking the village green for a cup of tea round about the time Tabitha got home from school, if he knew where their daughter had got to.

It was true that their daughter had been a little uncommunicative lately. They had put that down to the fact that the presence of the circus on the village green had brought a halt to her tumbling practice. Little did they suspect, when Tabitha complained how much she hated the circus, that this was a ploy; that when she said that she wished it would go away and let life get back to normal, this was a diversionary tactic. Because as soon as that Big Top went up, Tabitha had been in there, watching the trapeze artists practising high up beneath the translucent roof of the tent, chuckling as the clowns drove their Krazy Kar round the ring and breathing in the smell of horses, lions and greasepaint. And minutes later she was demonstrating her quickfire tumbling skills to the moustachio'd ringmaster (also known as The Ring Master, but that's a different story), snatching the euphonium from a band member and improvising a Theme to the Krazy Kar as it careered round the ring, and pleading for a chance to join up with Frollick's Circus.

Wellminstow life

The local Buddhist teacher and devotee is Ray, known as Mantra Ray for his incessant chanting. He occasionally jigs through the Mason's Handshake, dressed in a long yellow robe, a round mark of his girlfriend's Max Factor Sugarplum Red on his forehead, banging a tiny drum and chanting 'Om' to its rhythm. We shout 'Off' in counterpoint so as he trips in through the saloon door, in flagrant contravention of its 'No travellers, no badger baiters, no Buddhists' sign, and out again through the snug door the pub reverberates to the sound of Om-clank-Off!-clank-Om-clank-Off!-clank. Ray doesn't mind because more often than not after one of his solo chanting excursions he gets a new student or two. There are always a couple of extra lost souls in Wellminstow who need guidance to a higher plane and who can sit next to Ray in an enclosed space while he shepherds them on their journey deeper into themselves and not mind the smell.