The Mysterious Case of the Missing Burger
on Me Talk Pretty One Day (Malawi), 30/Mar/2009 12:23, 34 days ago
The facts are these:On Monday 9thMarch, 2009, at approximately 1800 hours Southern African Time, I began to prepare dinner in the living room of my modest little Malawian home. I have been cooking in the living room for a while now. Previously, I was in the habit of preparing meals in the kitchen, like a normal person, but that was before the hot-plate’s power adapter melted. Now I have ruined many meals in that kitchen it is true, but when you burn the plug of your cooking device, you have achieved a new level of incompetence and need to make a change. I could have purchased a book on the science of cooking; I could have asked some friends forhelp and advice, maybe a couple of lessons; I could even have employed someone to prepare my meals for me. I did not do any of these things. Instead, I decided to make what seemed like the most obvious decision—I moved all culinary operations from the kitchen to the living room.I admit, there were some minor, teething difficulties at first, like where do you stack the washing-up, and how do you remove cooking oil from the sofa. All things considered, however, I find slaving over a hot stove to be a less onerous task when performed from the comfort of your favourite armchair, and so I considered the move a resounding success.And that is why I sat there in my living room—on Monday 9thMarch, just like I said—book in hand, feet on coffee table, slaving over a hot stove. I had some spaghetti boiling in a pot and a couple of burgers frying nicely side-by-side in a pan. I was very much looking forward to my meal of ‘poor man’s spag-bol’, very much looking forward to my meal when the room was plunged suddenly and irrevocably into darkness. We have suffered blackouts nearly every day for the past month but the timing of this particular outage was especially annoying as, and I repeat this because it is important, I was very much looking forward to my meal.I could not stand another dinner of cornflakes and cookies so I cursed the state energy company, pulled the plug from the socket and stormed off to bed leaving the half-cooked burgers where they lay. As far as I could tell, the situation contained only one element of redemption: the possibility of spaghetti and burgers for breakfast tomorrow.But alas, it was not to be.I woke at around 4 a.m. (that’s what happens when you go to bed before 7) and once I had negotiated my way through the mosquito net, I went to the living room to check on breakfast. The spaghetti was there in the pot where it had sat all night long. And immediately next to it, where it had also sat all night long, was a single, solitary, lonely burger.The greasy, half-cooked burger was positioned to one side of the pan as if its partner from the night before were just as greasy, just as much half-cooked, just as much…. there! Only it wasn’t. It was gone. Nothing remained—no scrap, no crumb, not even a morsel. In fact, anyone arriving late on the scene could only have assumed that the second burger was a myth, a fantasy, a crazy conspiracy theory of some sort. But I had seen it for I had half-cooked it.Thoughts began running through my head. Maybe a burglar had broken in, left the lap-top perched on the armchair and the camera sat on the table, and instead chosen simply to steal a single burger. A burger burglar! I had to dismiss this theory after finding that all doors and windows were secure.Maybe the burger had melted and evaporated into thin air. It was a pretty cheap burger after all and contained very little meat. The only problem is that the other burger was much as I had left it and had not melted or evaporated even in the slightest.The thoughts kept coming. They swirled around inside my head and made me feel dizzy, the kind of dizzy you might feel if you had just eaten a greasy, half-cooked burger. And then it occurred to me—maybe I had eaten the burger. Maybe I had sleep-walked in the night and returned to the living room to devour the forgotten dinner… No. The chances of my escaping the mosquito net while unconscious is too far fetched an idea to fathom.Either I am going insane in the tropical heat, or I am not alone in this house and some creature lives here with me, small enough to go unnoticed yet big enough to eat an entire burger. Both possibilities are frightening in their own way. I have to do something. I have to make a change.So I have considered all of the options available to me and I have come to what seems to be the only sensible response—until this mystery is solved, I must do all of my cooking from now on, in the bathroom.