It is 7.15 on a recent freezing midwinter morning. With hands deep in my pockets, where they compete for room with a thick spiral notebook and a random selection of pens, and with the collar up round my ears against the nip of the morning, I enter the butchers shop by the side door. It is an historic moment. I am the first writer in residence at a butchers shop. The residence period will only be one day, which may strain the definition, but let’s not be too pedantic.
It happened like this. Acting on instructions from a higher power, I had recently gone to the butchers shop for stewing steak diced into ‘approximately five centimetre pieces’. I was embarrassed to have to make this outrageous demand and relieved when the young man behind the counter suggested that something from the window display would be about the right size.
Of course, it was wrong. If you’re going to slow-cook, you need sizeable chunks. Stephanie Alexander is categorical on this, as I now know. In the sometimes hilarious discussions that ensued on the following day, my wife explained to the butchers what five centimetre pieces looked like (they found a ruler in the office and verified her estimate) and why they should never give me the option of ‘near enough’. From this exchange they learned in passing that she was an editor and I was a writer. ‘Send him down,’ said Steve, the chief butcher. ‘He can write about us.’
When I arrive, the four butchers are strapping on their aprons, belts and knives. I now formally discover that they are Steve, Jason, Jim and Mick. They have worked in this shop for about five years, and they’re like the cast of a comedy who have been together since opening night and know all the punchlines in advance.
They go about their various duties with the certainty of long familiarity, but despite their focus on the task at hand, the banter and chat is constant. Jim wants to discuss the use of a full stop after abbreviations and somehow this gets us on to apostrophes. I congratulate them for not having the ubiquitous redundant apostrophe on their blackboard sign at the front of the shop:
‘Special – Snitzels $8 kg’. But shouldn’t it be ‘schnitzels’?
‘Depends who’s got the chalk,’ says Jim. ‘Keep it simple, I say.’
‘I’m learning so much