Beasting

Spring, and the early weeks of second semester, mark the official Beasting Season in St. Andrews. It’s a time when old relationships are broken or renewed, and when fresh couplings can occur at a rate of several per week.

In celebration of this festive time, I bought a leg of Beast. This was thanks to Tesco’s move to shift otherwise unwanted Turkey legs for 99p a shot. I could immediately see the possibilities ahead.

At a uniform price, it seemed like only good sense to go for quantity, and so I selected a drumstick of such awesome magnitude that it might rather have been used as a siege weapon, and dragged it home caveman style.

‘It is the Beast,’ I informed Frank, presenting it with a flourish. He needed no more convincing. Making a few hasty calculations, we were able to deduce that

1.       The Beast Leg must, at one time, have belonged to a bird that meant business, and

2.       The Beast Leg would take at least a fortnight to cook, plus marinade time.

‘Better put the oven on, mate,’ I said.

Luckily there were some primitive cooking instructions printed on the back of the styrofoam pack which rounded that figure down to somewhere pleasantly more in the region of two hours, so we prepared an oven tray and greased it up.

‘I’m going to Fred Flintstone that badboy,’ Frank said, cheerily.

We grabbed a few beers, and I tooled up an episode of Futurama or two. The air of anticipation was tangible. There may well have been some smoking, which would help to explain that tangible air, and also what happened next – if by ‘next’ you take me to mean ‘two hours later, when Frank went down to the kitchen’.

The howls of rage and anguish were heard the length and breadth of the house. I thought at first that Frank must have poured boiling turkey fat over himself, perhaps as a result of some further Dude greeting. I wondered if maybe he had even collapsed under the sheer weight of the Beast, and was struggling to free his mangled legs from the wreckage. For all the commotion, it would have been as easy to imagine that the rest of the turkey had come back for revenge.

What had happened, in fact, was merely what had not happened; Frank had not, at any time, put the Beast into the oven. He was sitting crumpled in a chair, whimpering quietly to himself by the time I got down to the kitchen, his rage entirely replaced by impotent resignation.

‘That’s a new one on me, mate,’ I informed him. ‘I mean, not turning the oven on, fair enough. We’ve all been there. But… this?’

‘It’s raw,’ he said, poking at the Beast as if willpower alone would be sufficient to cook a drumstick the size of Bristol. ‘Fucking hell, Quinine.’

‘I wondered what that mighty piece of chicken was doing out of the fridge,’ Gowan said. ‘Just sitting on the side like that.’ We held Frank back.

‘It’s turkey,’ Dylan said.

‘It is the Beast,’ I told them, authoritatively.