Not been on here for a few days, apologies, lot's has been going on.
First of all was a really good fun food service on Tuesday. There were loads of little kids about, and by little I mean little, between 3 and 7, hanging about in a giant flock of smiles and runny noses. They drove my hot food team mate Jacob mental climbing into the truck cab and beeping the horn, I think after a while they were just doing it on purpose which was hilarious. We made a little boy aged about 3 a cardboard box hat with a smiley face on it and he was made up. He spent a good hour running up and down the road scaring people, and having he time of his life. As heart warming and fun as it all was, that feeling of helplessness came back strong. These are preschool kids living in a site that's not fit for human habitation. Being kids they are wildly oblivious to what's going on around them, playing with what they find and getting up to mischief, but being an adult it breaks my heart to know that this is their life, and they have little or no hope of leading a normal one.
After work on Tuesday it was my housemate Leo's birthday, so we had a party. One of the best things about working in a warehouse full of clothes is that's it's basically a giant fancy dress box, so with that in mind the theme of 'drag' got floated and accepted. Being a balding man, dressing up as a pretty woman is kinda hard, so I settled on doing Britney Spears when she lost the plot and shaved her head, cue hot pants, a thong, and skimpy tee, with a badly shaved head. There were some great costumes, we had a Jesus, a couple of army rangers and Leo went as Elsa from the film Frozen. It got pretty messy, and my memory of the of it is a bit hazy, but loads of fun was had with some booze that we had been sent by a sympathetic distillery.
Wednesday was a nice chilled day off, spent most of it in bed just relaxing and napping before going back in on Thursday to do mains.
Thursday was lush. We had a guy called Seb in just for a flying visit and we got on with some amazing food. He's an old rave crew head from the early 90's so we spent ages talking about free parties, old rave tunes and food, it was loads of fun. He'd been working on a north African curry with loads of sumac and that went out Thursday lunchtime, before we got to work on my dish. I've been craving BBQ so much that I took the decision to risk cooking something along those lines. We roasted up some chicken in a classic north Carolinian spice mix of smoked paprika, brown sugar, cumin and garlic, before making a base of onions, roasted red peppers, more smoked paprika and black eyed peas. It came out really well, and went down a treat in camp. I'm glad they dug those flavors as it means I can play about with BBQ style a bit more.
Then today was Friday and it was a day in the free shops. Got to see all the boys too, Zee, Reza, and even Rebar. I'm so happy I got to see Rebar, it's been almost a month and I have been worried sick about him. He's told me where he lives now, so next time I'm in camp I'm going to go round and chill out for a bit. There were some folk in camp doing crepes with jam, so they all brought us little snacks throughout the day. It was very nice and chilled out.
Ok so that's loads of nice news and happy stuff, but as with life out here for every up there is also a massive down. The mayor of Calais seem to be taking a leaf out of Theresa Mays book (probably called How To Be A Heartless Bitch), and is trying to ban the distribution of food to refugees. This doesn't affect the food we do in camp, but all of those outreach boxes that we do each day, currently 150 at lunch and 250 in the evening, she wants to stop that. Basically she's trying to starve people out. The camp can't take anyone else so the numbers of people who now live in the forests and on the streets is growing, via some other charities we supply food to we try and make sure that these guys get fed. She's now said that people doing this will be arrested. Already a girl I know got tear gassed yesterday, and tonight Leo got pulled over driving home by the CRS. It seems this is the signal the cops need to make life even worse. Kids going to get fed at a local church that we supply food too are being arrested for nothing more than having brown skin, and I feel the harassment is only going to get worse. You can read more about it here, there's even a cheeky photo of Lux cooking.
So that kind of bring us up to date. Hotdogs for tea tonight and an early night.
Will check back in tomorrow with updates.
T
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