The unexpected ploughman's

It's lunchtime on a stinking-hot Sunday in July 2001.

Crowds of monied retirees are packing the local open-air museum for Classic Car Day. And they're hungry in the way only senior day-trippers know how to be.

In the museum cafe's windowless tin-can kitchen, a 15-year-old me is sweating bacon grease to keep up with the orders.

The ploughman's lunch is doing numbers, as it always and inexplicably does. But as I make what feels like my 4,012th of the day, I notice something chilling.

One loaf of bread. Half a block of cheese. No ham. The last scrapings of Branston pickle. A massive sack of onions, granted. But in strict ploughman's terms, we're running on fumes.

The orders, however, keep coming in.

My boss, Iris, is a chain-smoking catering veteran with skin like a vintage football.

She'll destroy me if I say it. But I've got to say it. I have to say it.

"Iris, four more ploughs and we'll need to take it off the men—"

"Keep it on."

"But we're running out of—"

"WE'RE KEEPING IT ON!"

I turn to Kev.

Kev wears a customised beard net and is banned from every train station in the Arun Valley.

Kev is no help.

I look at the clock. Still three hours until closing.

Orders for ploughmen's are double-pinned on the board.

This is it. I'm finished. I will never work in semi-legal local hospitality again.

Unless.

Unless ...

I check what's left in the hot cabinet. Then I look in the fridge.

And then I grab a dish. And I start plating.

One XXL Cornish pasty in the middle.

Four strips of crispy bacon balanced on it in a sort of hash pattern.

A failed quenelle of mango chutney.

And a whole, raw onion sliced in two on the side.

"Another ploughman's ready," I say, and slide it along the counter.

Iris looks at the plate. Then at me. Then back at the plate.

And she turns, picks it up and hands it to the man at the till.

"One ploughman's lunch, love. Enjoy!"

There's no time to wait for the inevitable volley of abuse coming my way. I have to shift these orders. So I get my head back down and keep plating.

Pasty. Bacon. Chutney. Onion. "One ploughman's!"

Pasty. Bacon. Chutney. Onion. "Another ploughman's!"

Before long I'm plating up in a trance. And with every shout of "ploughman's!" I'm more convinced that the nonsense I'm serving for ￡6.50 a pop is, in fact, as pure as the original men of plough would have made.

The next three hours pass in a hot, oily haze. When I finally snap back into consciousness, it's already 5.30pm. The cafe is almost empty.

I start to clear up and wipe down, thinking of all the Champ Man 00/01 I'll be able to play now I don't have a weekend job.

Then a stern-looking elderly man in a Morris Minor Owners' Club cap comes up to the counter.

He hands me his tray with two empty plates on it.

"Thank you, sir," I say. "Did you enjoy your food?"

"We both had the ploughman's," he says.

That wasn't my question. Oh shit. Brace, brace, BRA—

"Most unexpected," he says, picking up his freebie tote bag to leave.

"Cheerio."

And that was it.

I wasn't fired. I got paid for the shift. And we did it all again the following week, as if nothing had happened.

Though it didn't feel like a compliment at the time, I realise now that "unexpected" is perhaps the highest praise you can give any piece of creative work.

That the most effective creations are usually conceived from the sweatiest of self-doubting chaos.

And that they always start with the tightest constraints.