Do you remember the football food
survey of a few years ago? One wag then said of Wembley food, ‘It is better if you
sit on your food and eat your seat.’ In the best traditions of life imitating art,
Southampton heeded this advice when arranging a sell off of Dell artefacts. Most things
were up for grabs, lumps of concrete, hunks of turf, whole urinals even. But they drew the
line at their ‘dellicious’ red seats. A health expert had warned them
that, due to the ingredients of the red paint, the seats would be injurious if eaten. When
pressed, the health expert conceded that eating one seat would not prove too harmful.
Apparently, the trouble kicked in after two were consumed. However, in an over zealous
interpretation of the Edible Seats Act, Southampton refused to sell any of their red
seats. To be fair, the one seat per supporter allocation could easily be circumvented as
fans winningly disguised as Roy Keane lined up for second helpings.
This far-fetched farrago begs the question, ‘how would the
seats be eaten’? Presumably, like elephants, they would be eaten in small bites.
Perhaps they would be eaten communally with groups of supporters snapping and snarling
over their shared pickings much a like a pride of lions tearing apart a stricken zebra.
You can picture millions of mums disappointing their whining kids by insisting that the
seat is put back in the fridge before it spoils their dinner. But perhaps seat consumption
would be more furtive, with fevered anorexic binges behind locked bedroom doors.
Incidentally, I once knew a girl who chomped through the family three-piece suite. There
was nothing furtive here. Her eating habits were quite public as were her leftovers. In
the family’s front room, you either sat in a bottomless pit or you stood. There was
no problem with her health, though. Judging by her flawless complexion she seemed to
thrive on the upholstery. As an aside she was excluded from school. It wasn’t the
large bits of sofa stuffed inside the pouches of her cheeks that the teachers objected to,
so much as the scratching noises made by her classmates whenever she was around.
And what would the stomach juices make of this repast? You can
imagine bemused enzymes leaving through their manual of bizarre consumables, looking for
instructions on how to digest football seats but finding only entries under Action Men and
Ford Mondeos. Presumably, all JCB operators’ leave would be cancelled once the seats
came down the tubes.
If seat eating becomes a trend then Roy Keane will have no cause
for complaint. Perhaps he will rejoice as battalions of seat eaters munch their way
through Old Trafford, each with their macho T Shirt inscription, ‘Prawn To Be
Wild’. With that I think I’ll have a little lie down.
