The Omelette Maker

From a canal path confrontation comes bobo redemption in this docu-fiction by Benedict Seymour

The hipster was riding home from work along the canal path, past the yuppie apartments. The light was beautiful through the clouds and everything had a magical sheen in the aftermath of the rainstorm.

As he cycled toward the old bridge he heard the sound of hipster voices and looked up to see beautiful girls in long evening dresses and some elaborately coiffed hipster males lingering beside a series of blue double decker buses. Filmwaves – or something like that – said the white lettering on the blue metal flank of the bus. The film crew he had seen this morning was still there, only now they were exchanging phone numbers and chatting. It was still light and warm and the mood on the canal path seemed nonchalant, the evening sweetly calm.

All photos by CJ Lotz

The hipster cycled into the tunnel and as he rolled along under its wide brick arch, he spied a hooded figure ahead of him a little way up the tow path. The form gradually swam into focus. It was swaying slightly from one foot to the other, and appeared to be looking for help or something. Or maybe he was just watching and being friendly? As the hipster pedalled closer he could see the pallid face of the hooded youth. He was still wondering but then quickly became aware that the person was not randomly loitering but in fact actively blocking his path. Oh.

Give me your fucking wallet, said the asbo, with pale lips, lurid sweaty skin and eyes like black holes. He seemed to be using the remains of his drug-addled agency to arrange his snarling mouth into the most aggressive attitude obtainable. In his hand, a glass bottle, unbroken, but obviously possessing the capacity to harm.

OK ok ok, said the hipster, Wait, and started to scrabble in his satchel.

Give me the fucking money NOW, how much have you got how much have you got?

I I I... said the hipster knowing he had no money but was more than willing to part with the wallet, as he remembered his many friends who had suffered variations on grievous bodily harm in similar experiences some years ago.

Here, here it is, he passed the wallet over much faster than the time it would have taken you to read all that, And your phone, Give me your fucking phone or I'll cut you.

All of this was freighted with implication that beyond the bottle somehow he must have other weapons to hand, a knife at least. His swaying motion and generally febrile air made the hipster wonder, even as he diligently made swift motions to comply with this new request, just how hard could this kid really be?

If he hadn't been totally blocked, asbo in front, wall to port, canal to starboard, he might have made a bit more of an effort to resist or abscond.

Maybe someone would turn up? Surely someone must be about to turn up? The road up beside the canal was teeming with amateur actresses and key grips, there were kids playing, the whole thing was a macabre joke. But no one was turning up and the young man had a very effective way of communicating his impatience. Very soon the hipster's scrabbling fingers had located his shiny eight-month-old Nokia (6113) and he handed it straight to his tormentor. Almost straight away the youth made off – after snarling something like, don't come after me or I'll kill you. Something along those lines.

The hipster rolled his bike back along the canal, looked up and saw a big black guy with a walkie talkie and told him what had happened. The guy informed him that the film crew had been ripped off five grand of equipment and everyone was waiting for the police to arrive (typical).

Down the canalside, a child in a baseball hat threw something into the canal which the hipster maybe somewhat absurdly assumed was his phone. But he made it clear to the small group of other hipsters, who were worried about their stolen stuff, that that child was not his particular criminal, even if the child had engaged in nefarious activity in the very recent past.

Some of the hipster girls, from afar, asked him if he was ok but they didn't exactly run over to help him or smother him in consolatory kisses. The hipster males were simply annoying and asked stupid questions and made dumb jokes from behind their idiotic facial topiary so the hipster (our hipster) decided to leave before the cops came. It wasn't as if they would be able to catch the youth and if they did they would probably let him go and try and arrest the hipster instead or something (it had happened before).

The hipster got home, almost eager or excited to be once again calling up and cancelling his cards, his phone, making arrangements to get a new sim, etc.

He called a friend and upon realising he had exactly enough food in the house to make an omelette but virtually no omelette making experience, with a little basic advice from his friend he set about creating a confection built around four eggs, some curly oven chips (the last in the bag), five stalks of asparagus, two cloves of garlic, pepper, salt, and plenty of grated parmesan. Even though he was engaged in narrating his evening's debacle to the friend at the same time as cooking the omelette it actually came out incredibly well.

He, who had never made omelettes, who was always socially hamstrung by his lack of mastery of this most hegemonic bourgeois virtue, had suddenly produced a more than respectable work of culinary science. He could hold up his head with the best of his hipster artist friends, even the relentlessly crafty ones who, while derogating intellection and political activity in almost all conceivable forms, had become aristocrats of organic cuisine.

What would they say if they could see him now? If they could taste his sunburnt, luscious, cheese drooling pouch of carbohydrates and sheer style (oh yes – it had chopped up fucking coriander leaves in it, too)!

It was suddenly clear. He had undergone a personal epiphany and it was all thanks to that little asbotic motherfucker on the canalside. If he hadn't planted his perspiring, drugaddled mug and bottomlessly black blank eyes, his white glassbottle brandishing mitts in the hipster's face he might still be the Tesco's-finest-buying no hoper standing lonely and unlovable at the back of the Tescometro que as young lovers in Kitsune clobber cooed and billed over their next culinary project and stuffed their reusable net bags full of all the right and occasionally properly outré ingredients (not that most of these wouldn't already have been purchased at the farmer's market on Saturday; in many ways coming to Tesco's at all must have seemed deliciously sordid for them, like a trip to a lapdance club or a lazar house; it would bring them even closer together, like Brad and Angelina visiting Haiti).

No, the asbo on the path had changed all that. Before he had been the outcast of all the hipster race, alone among a generation who if nothing else had mastered the art of gourmet cooking and lent their very bodies and being to the cause of the slow food revolution. Now he was one of them at last. They might even think about inviting him to their weddings in Italy or wherever. After all, they would surely want to know all about his ideas for a great omelette.

It struck him with the force of an allegory – this asbokid had saved him and turned him into what he had always wanted to be, a total bourgeois.

It was like a Ken Loach film, but true. A bourgeois liberated by an asbo!

The first Ken Loach film that was ever true.

Benedict Seymour <ben AT metamute.org> is a writer based in the East End of London. With The London Particular [www.thelondonparticular.org] he made a couple of films about the gentrification of the area and is currently working on an essay about the political and filmic representation of the working class