How many did it feed? Quite a few....
Some years ago I was doing a class for electrical students, time was nearly up to morning coffee break (with sarnies-of course) and minds were starting to think of things other than the delights of the subject I was teaching.
One of the lads (from a very rural area) suddenly asked if I could cook a proper meal, you know meat and stuff.
I said that I could and went on getting my gear tidied away for the break.
He looked rather palid at this time...
"How long would you cook a swan for Sir?"
A what?
A swan, you know those big white things that fly.
How the hell would I know that? Apart from the fact that my mind said something about it being illegal to kill them. Better than that, why do you want to know?
The story came out, they had been called out to an overhead line fault and found that the cause of the fault was a bird strike (said swan). It was obviously dead with a broken neck and some burn marks from it's encounter with the high voltage conductors.
The crew made up their minds that it shouldn't have died in vain and promptly wrapped it up to carry home.
One of the gang took it home and prepared it and then found that the equation of large swan (plucked and cleaned by then) to one oven (domestic size) does not compute.
"He had to remove it's legs and neck to get it into the oven". "Even then he had to use a lot of force to get it into the oven, it was a big b****r was that bird".
One of the students (who will always ask the questions that you really don't want to know the answer to) then asked how this was done.
Simple, you take a hacksaw and......
One lad asked if he'd used a new blade in the saw. "Nah, he just used the one that was in the frame". Just to think of what that blade had been used for previously...
A horrible silence greeted this and a few faces looked a bit green.... Oh boy, just what you need to think of over your morning brew and sarnie.
To end this discussion I asked him if the final step had been to consume said swan, and just why did he want to know if I could cook meat.
"Well really Sir, I just wondered if you knew the cooking time for swan, the guy had done it for many hours and it appeared, to me, that it was not fully cooked when he brought the cold sliced meat into the depot to share out among the crew"." For future reference sort of thing you know, just in case he had got the cooking time screwed up." (The "cook" was also in deep trouble at home with his missus because he had blocked the drain from the sink with the amount of fat this thing had produced during the cooking).
And did you eat it? If you did what was it like?
"Tried a bit" said the lad," tasted bloody terrible. Never again."
The class was by now looking at him as though he had just admitted being a cannibal with more than a few murmurings of what practices these people from the far flung areas get up to.
The lad looked a bit upset when I reminded him that, although my mind was like a rubbish tip and that I could remember odd bits and pieces about a lot of things, this was an engineering department and not a domestic science lesson. Better than that, I was very unlikely to be the next T.V. cooking guru with the speciality of the menu being swan and how to cook it.
That was the first, and likely the only time in my memory, that there was not a stampede to get to the canteen for the morning break.
And as for the starter of this thread, Mr PMK, methinks that you are trying to pull some wool (high quality maybe) over peoples eyes. Everyone knows that you don't get large creepy crawlies in Somerset. The mystics down around Glastonbury cast them all out many years ago! Or could it have been the after effects (withdrawal symptoms) from a generous helping of the old white lightning that is so popular around the area.
