food on the road
food on the road
all the meals I made my company pay for the last few days
At the back of the Waterloo Hall in Wellington College, there’s a secret mezzanine you can only access through a narrow concrete staircase, littered with empty boxes and electrical equipment. It gently slopes down in a handful of wide, short wooden steps, a warm shiny shade of brown like the varnished walls down in the main hall. At their end is a thick parapet, from which you lord over the main room – its battle plans, framed war paintings, grand piano, tall windows and dutch doors. Even at 5’2” (and I should know), you’re eye level with the painted white beams, the gold leaf ceiling details, the round side windows, the extruded skylights, and the man himself, posing in oil in his military best.
If you’ve been waiting for a point to this, I have great news – your patience is being rewarded with a morsel of context. To earn the money that I need to feed myself, I spend much of my weekdays doing marketing for a company in education. Yes, writing newsletters is in part my job, and yet here I am, rambling in your inbox off the clock and not even checking the open rate. Anyway; once a year, they wheel me out of the office to go shake some hands at the Festival of Education, which takes place in grounds so sprawling, buildings so richly decorated, gardens so fragrant it almost makes you question your socialist ideals.
Maybe as a way to ease the guilt, I arrive at noon on the Wednesday determined to show capitalism what I’m made of and squeeze every penny I can out of the company card to fill my stomach (making sure to get a receipt every time to avoid my office manager’s wrath).
First stop: the college’s café, inexplicably called the V&A, which I’m directed to by a completely overwhelmed director of operations who just wants me out of her way. I get a toasted ham and cheese ciabatta. I eat it over emails and try to convince myself that if you close your eyes and let go of everything you believe in, it’s basically a croque-monsieur.
I make my way to our exhibitor stand, and slowly build, tape, cable tie, cut and arrange all the business show tat that, for the last few weeks, had only existed as Photoshop files and strongly worded emails to late providers on my laptop. We got tiny wee pots of jelly beans to give away to visitors, and my colleagues and I snack on them throughout the afternoon for fuel.
In the evening, we break bread with some of the smartest, most impactful people in education in a quiet restaurant. We order two of each dish in the “tapas” section of the menu and one of each side, and watch our long table fill with a kingly spread. Three different flavours of chicken wings (garlic and parmesan, hot honey, bbq) with thin, crispy skin; bouncy calamari in a crumbly shell; bright green tenderstem broccoli; more garlic bread and fries than we knew what to do with; breaded halloumi sticks with a sweet, spicy dip; meaty prawns in a hot, bright, sticky sauce; creamy mac and cheese with a crunchy, caramelised top; long wooden boards covered in dips and warm triangles of pitta; chilli straight from bowl to mouth; flatbreads with creamy toppings. We spend the evening passing the small plates from one end to the other, asking so-and-so whether they tried this-and-that, drinking beer from pint glasses with a handle.
The alarm rings at 6am the following morning in the world’s happiest place: a Premier Inn by a big roundabout on the periphery of a small commuter town. I’m only joking a little – unlike some of my coworkers who spend half the year on the road, I see this as a rare luxury, where I can take as many hot baths as I want, and sleep restfully knowing that I’ll get the exact same room wherever I am in the UK. I show up to the restaurant with wet hair as soon as breakfast opens, and stack a criminally small plate high with warm croissants and pains au chocolat. I also grab a yoghurt, honey and apple for good measure.
We get back to the college. I manage to grab coffee for everyone at the world’s slowest café on wheels (swearing to never veer off from the V&A ever again), and make it to the Waterloo Hall for the first session just in time. I switch between the floor and mezzanine the whole morning, to get the cool camera angles I need to live post.
In the mid-morning break, I sneak out to our stall – we’ve hired a guy to give out strawberries and cream and there’s a queue forming. I know we only have 500 portions and I’ve worked too hard on this to not get at least one of them. I try to eat it somewhat quietly and gracefully (key word: try) in the back of the next talk.
By the time lunch rolls around at 1.30pm (whose idea was this??) I'm ravenous. I make a half-assed attempt to join the massive queue for the Korean fried chicken stand, and immediately remember my first Festival of Education, where I spent 1h25 queuing for and 5 minutes wolfing down my cauliflower wings in a panic. I get the genius idea to try the café – if I didn’t know it existed until the day before, surely neither does anyone. I get there and am met with a short queue and one singular, lonely all-day breakfast sandwich left on the shelves. It’s fate. I eat it on a metal chair in the sun, with a packet of cheddar and chives crisps.
My colleague and I get a cab back to the hotel, and meet up again a little while later, to find a pub to have a much-deserved beer and dinner, watch Murray lose the doubles, and hopefully see the general election exit polls come in – if we can stay awake until then. By some stroke of luck, we stumble on a pub a couple of minutes from the hotel that smokes its own meats, and feast on a sample platter and two fat pints of beer in a large veranda. The ribs are disappointingly dry, the wings are fine, the smoked sausage is delightful if a bit under seasoned, the pulled pork is amazingly rich and creamy. Somehow, the real star of the show ends up being the corn on the cob, juicy, sweet and caramelised. We don’t even make it to the end of the tennis match, and I fall fast asleep minutes after getting the confirmation that Labour won by a lot.
Thankfully, the morning is much the same as the one before: stacks of pastries, a bit of protein and fibre, ice cold water. At the college, I make a beeline for the café for hot drinks, and am in and out in 5 minutes, balancing four cups in a cardboard tray while wearing a suit like some kind of finance intern.
When it finally gets to 1.30pm, I’m well and truly spent. My phone is reading 8,000 steps just from speedwalking back and forth between stall and hall, placing hundreds of flyers on hundreds of seats before the start of every talk, going around the room and up and down the concrete staircase for the good shots, and saying “I’ll walk with you!” to the dozens of people who want to talk to me. The café is entirely out of food. I suddenly remember that the stall next to the Korean fried chicken started out with a much shorter queue, and that I could still join it before it got crazy if I hustled. I had written it off the day before because it’s called “Bombay-ish” and manned exclusively by white people, but needs must. I order “tikka paneer with naan”; I am handed a styrofoam box with lettuce, lightly spiced cubes of paneer and squeezy-bottled sauces stacked on thick naan.
I sneak back into the empty Waterloo Hall, climb the concrete steps, drag a dirty chair down to the edge and prop my meal onto the parapet. I let out a big sigh. I eat my average, company-expensed Indian-ish meal with only the sounds of tinnitus in my ears, eye-to-eye with Arthur Wellesley, both suspended feet into the air. When a member of staff walks into the hall below to check what needs to be taken down later, we make eye contact. We silently wink at each other.
