Souperlative

Whoever tells a lie cannot be pure in heart -- and only the pure in heart can make good soup. Well then the folks over at New C-- Food Co. (actually, appending "New" to the front of any location makes it seems all the more dicey, like "New Shanghai", reeking of dime buffets that give one stomach-ransacking diarrhoea and dollar whores that give one a burning sensation upon going to the toilet) must ironically have the hearts of two year olds, since they are purveyors of such wonderful soups, not just of your pedestrian chicken and mushroom garden variety soups but also of other more glamorous and exhilarating flavours like parsnip and ginger or Moroccan chicken. Much like the Zig "Clean colour" pens that people never seem to be able to collect all the myriad colours of, I just had to plunge myself into the plethora of tastes (at a discount price even!) that the good people of New C-- Food Co. were offering in their soups, the anticipation just quivering on the outside of the neat, appealing tetrapaks, seducing us into challenging them with whatever in the world could one not make into a soup (Wiener Schnitzel, I am thinking.)

As most people will attest to, there's just something special about soup, bubbling with reassurance, breathing with consolation. When a homeless vagrant sips the thin, canned tomato soup at the shelter, is he not temporarily removed from the worry that his cardboard abode will blow away in the winter wind or thoughts of jobs lost and families scattered? Or the affluent, portly stock broker who puffs at his silver spoon of Lobster-Caviar-Foie Gras-Brick of Gold bisque, the anxieties of unseen money piling up in unseen vaults shunted right to the back of his mind? Indeed, soup will remind most people of home, where we pine for those decidedly rather vile herbal concoctions our mothers lovingly conjure up because it is so comforting, despite it tasting like a cockroach was just removed from it.

But as I write this, I too feel like I am eating the thinnest cabbage soup from which a cockroach has been pulled from (and it had died there) because a more cynical me (Ha-hah! It is I!) is telling me to put a sock in it and stop making soup seem like a pleasant, comely woman. You hold this off for a week, and then you come write about soup? Bloody soup? Already, I am finding, in a series of increasingly dire warnings, that the insect content of what I am eating is rapidly overtaking its vegetable content. It's like trying to keep down the nausea associated with the worst gastritis you can imagine, but imagine now that you had, before that, consumed a doughnut that had spent the better part of a week under a wardrobe. And such was the bubbling, and stewing of a certain cynical spirit during the time when I was watching the evergreen The Sound of Music.

While yes, it is truly a very innocent sort of show where there isn't any moral ambiguity about the amiability of the Nazis, one cannot help thinking about the supposedly adult themes it contains, nor the plot black holes as large as the US trade deficit and the embarrassing implausibilities. Yes, absolutely, entirely a world of rampant racism, sordid seduction, prevalent paedophilia where all nuns are skilled car mechanics. Still, if children can become instant singing machines (just add water! Garments now 35% more transparent), it was thoroughly enjoyable.

Is that a leg I see? Yes, under that sliver of cabbage. Hey, it moved!

I'd paste song lyrics here, but I don't swing that way.