Concrete and Clay

Aberdeen Angus Steakhouses aka Angus Steakhouses - deathly inside as though an undertaker had decided to join forces with a slot-machine arcade maker to create a restaurant serving as a morgue for flaccid steaks with red-veloured booths like coffins for near-dead tourists and lost souls whose grey faces stare out onto Leicester Square meeting the eyes of pigeons skipping through shit and newspapers.

Although I've never set foot inside of one of one, it amazed me for years that this death-as-restaurant chain could afford to have at least fourteen thousand branches in central London alone, all of which are empty most of the time. That was until it dawned on me that the truth was not as suprising as it might have been and that these hellish beef death-dispensaries could only be the money-laundering front for a gang of illegal Romanian porcelain figures, mostly clowns though also shepherds and busts of long-dead emperors, sick of seeing their brothers taken to live in the windows of every single slot-machine arcade in England.

How sweet it must be to them now to see the fruits of their revenge on a friday night in London - booth after booth of sunken-cheeked humans, condemned for all time to shove limpid, Romanian beefcuts into their cracker-dry mouths like exhibits in the countless windows of Aberdeen Angus aka Angus Steakhouses around the city, if not the world.

Be careful next time you push pounds into arcade machines, you know not who you are condemning to chew.