• 2003: No 3784

    2003

    Competition No 3784

    Banal instructions in the style of a famous writer.

     

    The Samuel Beckett Cookbook

    HOW TO BOIL AN EGG

    First catch your egg. That is, if you’re Beeton, defeated, routed, vanquished, crushed. You can’t go on, you won’t go on,  you go on … and on.  Fill a pan with water and put it on the gas. In the good old days if you didn’t light the gas it would drag you into the welcome embrace of death. You light the gas. Wait for the  water to boil. You know it is boiling, because tiny bubbles form, rise to the surface and are lost, like the souls of aborted children passing into nothingness. Put two eggs into the pan. One will crack its shell – a reasonable proportion, for as Democritos the Abderite said, ‘the universe itself is like a cracked egg’. Leave to boil for three minutes. There are twenty time three minutes in an hour, four hundred and eighty in a day, 3360 in a week, 175,200 in a year – and so on to eternity. As it boils, think of the chicken that will never be, cast straight from conception into the burning heat of hell. When it’s finished, then eat your breakfast, if you can ….