Help! My cook is a rapscallion...

I was going to start this one by apologising for having a cook. You know how it is. In the world today, before you talk about wealth, especially your wealth or your family's wealth, you must first apologise for being wealthy. And I'm not saying that the Afam family is a wealthy one. All you need to know is that Papa Afam (may God bless his incredible soul) works hard and can afford to pay the school fees of the only child he has that's still in school, and that I, Afam also work hard but cannot afford to put petrol in the car that I drive. I'm not complaining. You would think I would hate it, but I don't. There's something about being monumentally broke when you're in your early twenties. It's a little bit of a communal experience. It's even more unifying when you're a writer of sorts. Do you know how many broke writers there are out there? No? That's because no one knows. It is possible that if my cook was as skilled as the rat in ratatouille, I would have felt guilty enough to apologise for my privilege. What privilege you wonder? It's the my parents both went to university, worked like bastards, and sacrificed like martyrs so that they and their children could live well privilege. But he isn't. I suppose that's the wrong thing to say. He is skilled in a way. He can chop and dice and fry and boil, but he's got the imagination of a boiled egg. That is to say that he is so unimaginative that I imagine that he must have been the recipient of a lobotomy at birth. He once served yam porridge, potato porridge, sweet potato porridge and plantain porridge in the same week. I was aghast. I starved. I'm incapable of coming back after my 9 to 5 to eat porridge. I'd rather eat nothing at all, and so I haven't been eating.

While all of that is quite terrible, it doesn't top what he did two days ago. I had a meeting in the morning, for some project I'm supposed to be working on quite soon and I didn't have any time for breakfast so I raced out of the house at eight with a mug of coffee, dreaming about what I would eat for supper. I usually don't eat out because I always regret it. When you're as broke as I am, you vacillate between berating yourself for your profligate ways and languishing in your perpetual lack of disposable income. My day that day ended at about eight. I dragged my feet through the door and asked Caderouse for my supper. I was famished! I was ravenous. I was on the brink of dying of hunger. Here is what Caderouse brought me.

Somebody's getting fired.

Happy Days,
Afam