The Zezaurian Guide to Wild Cooking

In some kind of unconscious rebellion against food pornographers, eating dirt-filled slop on the cold ground, naked, covered in nettle stings and insect bites has become the latest way for Zezaurians to purify both their souls and their colons.

Instead of taking pictures of food as if planning to fornicate with it after the shoot, we have now fully embraced wild dining along with its numerous frustrations and challenges.

Yes,  sometimes after consuming one of our camp-stove creations you need to be de-wormed, but by eating our disgusting slop you’re making solid progress in removing all the smug posing that has become such a staple ingredient in contemporary cooking.

So get ready to singe your moustache hair and worsen your piles: here is the Zezaurian guide to cooking in the wild.

Your tongue is only a thermometer

Taste is ephemeral. Food spends literally seconds riding over the top of your tongue before spending the next five hours rotting in stomach acid.

In the wild you should only think of this muscular organ as a temperature gauge and try to get the food into your gut as quickly as possible. Do not talk. Do not breathe. Do not comment on the beautiful sunset. Test the slop’s temperature, and if it’s anything between ‘lukewarm’ and ‘manageably hot’, get it in your belly before something else eats it.

You may have made the food, but you’re not the only one in the wild that wants it. Insects, rats, badgers, boars. They all want your slop. Limit the chances they will take it from you by speed eating.

There’s a substitute for taste

Don’t fret about the beige homogenous gloop on your plate not tasting of anything – Zezaurian wild cooking substitutes flavour for quantity. It’s a fair trade-off and is central to our culinary philosophy.

Less taste, more slop. Balance is maintained, so quit fretting and shovel that crap down your throat before the doggers arrive.

Mind games

The standard issue Trangia stove that all Zezaurians should own, alongside their feelings of self-loathing and social anxiety, comes with two small bowls and a pan. Making anything more than regular slop on one of these things – say, spicy slop, miscellaneous gloop and swill, served together on one plate as a mezze – is actually like solving a brain teaser, not dissimilar to the riddle of taking a fox, a chicken and a sack of grain across a river only two at a time in a boat.

How do you half-cook the slop, keep it warm, half-cook the gloop, and keep them both warm, then boil the swill while re-heating the slop and then frying the rest of the gloop before reducing the swill and getting everything on the same plate at the same time at the same temperature? By sheer, uncontrollable panic. Burned hands and a toilet mouth is our strategy. Try it.

And please remember: temperature is everything here. It must be VERY hot. Do you have any idea how expensive it is getting de-wormed?

Washing up

The only other use for your tongue is to superficially clean all utensils, so get licking like Khia holds the whip.

Celebrate the ending

Defecating is, ordinarily, performed with very little ceremony or pomp. But why? The end is still a part of the meal as much as the start is. Have we been socially conditioned to distance conversation from this most essential of farewells?

Own it. Enjoy it. Smell it.

Instagram it, you fucking posers.

So Long...

You've been with me for years. Together we've trod in shit, danced like a boob, run away from fights, splashed in piss and kicked people in the balls.

 The best pair of shoes I ever had.

Z Camp 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Falcon Punch

Ka-pow.

Recently I have been running instead of cycling around London in an effort to up my fitness levels. I’ve even been drinking protein smoothies to get RIPPED and reduce my bra size. But that is not today's story.


No, civilians. That is just the "intro" to today's story.

You see, when going around London on a bike you’re usually concentrating hard on not getting run over by prawn-heads driving with low IQs and yabbering into their mobiles. However, now I'm on the pavement my view of the world is different and I seem to notice just how many people throw litter on the ground.

I don't know about you, but littering is just about the worst thing a human can do. It shows such a fundamental lack of respect for anything that if you're happy to lob a coke can into a defenceless bush, then you’re probably cool stabbing a baby in the face.

In short, nothing bursts my piles more than litter bugs. And yes, I said "litter bugs" like I'm seven and learning about the environment for the first time. But that's what they are: bugs to be squished and shat upon by us decent folk.

Now, the only problem I have is that if someone is okay stabbing a baby/littering, then they're also probably okay punching me in my beautiful face too. That's why, thus far, I've never had the balls to tell a litter bug to pick up their rubbish and put it in a bin like a normal, fully developed and reasoned person would.

This vexes me because it makes me a weakling.

Well, turds to that, because I just passed the ultimate Good Citizen Test this morning when I was walking to work and a couple (an actual husband and wife tag team) attacked a man in the street.

I have no idea why the couple did this, and I didn’t hear the argument because I was listening to Justin Bieber's latest opus on my headphones. But, as everyone stood around watching, I still rushed over and stepped between the punches, kicks and screams...and HOLY SHIT, like a mutha-chunking super hero I actually managed to break that shizzle up. I even took a few punches, but shrugged them off like they were no thang (however, I did later wimper a little, alone, in a toilet cubicle).

The fight ended and I actually managed to restrain a bigger man than me, telling him to "cool it."

What an amazing thing to shout into a stranger's face. "Cool it, bro...not on my watch."

So yeah. I assume this means I'll be fine telling a litter bug to use the rubbish bins the council conveniently provided in future. Non?

Whatever it means, I’m now known as The Zezauriator.

Please use the bins provided.

A Zezaurian guide to making a crap birthday present slightly less crap

My dad is literally the hardest person in the solar system to buy a gift for. He has a few hobbies, such as beekeeping and hiding in his shed doing goodness-knows-what. But, at 61 years old, with reasonable wealth, what more do you need? You already own everything you want to own, such as those drill heads and that Expert Guide to Falling Asleep During Any Film. I scoured the internet for weeks trying to find him something. But Nothing. Out of all the millions and millions of things you can buy, he doesn’t need any of it.

So, in a panic, I just got him some beers for his birthday, which felt like a safe bet. But that’s pretty boring and makes me, the “creative and thoughtful” eldest child, look a bit like an uncaring and uncreative shit head.

Assuming you’re reading this whilst nodding your head, thinking; yes, my dad is also a pain in the ass when it comes to gifts, try this alternative approach: make the fucker work for it. Do you know how much time I wasted looking for something for you on the internet? That was Drib Drab's internet porn time, buster. So I buried my boring beer gift in the woods -- got the coordinates for the tree I planted them under and drew him a map. It's a punishment for being so difficult.

Using his dorky GPS gizmo, off he goes. Puff puff, pant pant.

That’s it Steve. You’re welcome. What’s that? You wanted to spend your afternoon watching the DVD Box Set of The Pacific – the one thoughtful gift someone got you after working out what you’d actually like for your birthday? Ooops. 

I should’ve filled it with IOUs. Man, that would've been way more hilarious. Happy Birthday, you old fart dearest father.

Love from Drib Drab. xxx

It's the bottom one.

Anal itching -- A rough guide

Anal itching may be just an annoyance, or may be so troublesome that it dominates your life. It is usually made worse by warmth, and is often most troublesome in bed. The skin round the anus easily becomes irritated and inflamed. This is because it is difficult to keep the area round the anus clean and dry; the skin is crinkly and traps tiny faecal particles. Eww. It is also sweaty and airless, and it may be moist from an anal or vaginal discharge. Double ewww. When it becomes irritated, scratching is a natural reaction, but this damages the skin further – what we in the business call the  "itch/scratch cycle".

Causes of anal itching

Washing too much...or not enough! Poor hygiene can be responsible for anal itching, but so can excessive cleaning, especially if you use harsh soaps or a brush. A fucking brush!

 

Leakage of faeces can lead to itching around the anus. This is made worse after tangy, vegan food.

Ointments and creams are notorious causes of anal itching. If you have itching, it is a natural reaction to buy an anaesthetic gel for the anal area. Most of these are labelled ‘for haemorrhoids’ and contain lignocaine, tetracaine, cinchocaine, pramocaine, chilli powder or benzocaine with other ingredients. At first they help, but then the itching may return because you have become sensitive to one of the ingredients in the cream or ointment and they are keeping the area moist. Do not use them for more than 1 week.

 

Skin conditions, such as psoriasis or eczema, can affect the skin round the anus and cause itching. Pile can sometimes be itchy, partly because of the fucking gross, slimy discharge they produce. How have you even got friends?

 

Fungal infections, similar to thrush or athlete’s foot, are another common cause. Fungi fucking love warm, damp and damaged skin, so if you have an itchy anus for any reason and then damage the skin by scratching, fungi can take hold and basically have a massive party in your ass.

 

Sexually transmitted infections are what many people worry about, but are not usually the reason.

• Bum warts, caused by papillomavirus, thrive in warm, moist conditions such as the skin near the anus and can be very itchy.
• Herpes can also infect the anus if someone has rimmed you with a disgusting cold-sore.

Bumworms are tiny worms, about 13 mm long, which live in the lower part of the bowel. They are very common and make me want to throw up just thinking about them. The female worms, the dirty bastards, creep out of the anus at night – how they know it is night, and why they come out only at night, is an X-File. They lay about a billion eggs on the skin of the anus, causing intense, mind-numbing itching at night. When you cave in and scratch your bum hole the eggs lodge under your fingernails, and it is easy to transfer them to your mouth (you dirty weirdo) and reinfect your gut by swallowing the eggs. Aghhhhhhh!

 

Pleasure. It is worth asking yourself whether you are deriving a perverse, almost erotic, pain/pleasure from scratching the itchy area, which is keeping the irritation going. GO ON: ASK YOURSELF.