Today's Special: Rat on a Stick

Small lizards with no tastebuds who have spent all their lives in caves (as yet unexposed to the concepts of cookery, kitchens, or food apart from miniature green slimy swimming things) would take around four-and-a-half seconds to work out there is something wrong with my college's dining hall. By wrong here, we're talking seriously wrong, as in "fundamentally wrong beyond all reason".

I was queuing up a little while ago so that I could pay to sample the delicacies on offer, and went for the most edible-sounding thing on the menu, "Lamb Kebab". The person in front of me, a balding 4th-year with glasses and an impossibly vast raincoat, was presented with this offering as well. We looked glumly at our plates in a kind of Oliver-meets-Manic-Depressive way, before the 4th-year said knowingly, "Rat on a Stick."

A few days later Rat-on-a-Stick was beaten by what could only be called "Modern Art". I admit, some of this was my fault - the four main courses on offer each looked equally dreadful, so I decided to cut my losses and get a small helping of each, my reasoning being that if one tasted like death warmed up (and that was the vegetarian course), I could move onto the next one.

My brilliant plan was foiled by the towering intellect of the man with the serving spoon, who waited behind the counter, clutching it as if he was going to use it to beat small rodents senseless, before sending them down to the kitchens to be kebab-ed. This guy, I should mention, is the sort of person who would blindly introduce bulls to china-shop owners at parties, send puffer-fish drifting blissfully into a children's swimming pool, or put David Attenborough in a toreador's outfit.

Needless to say, he thought putting chicken curry, baked beans, chips and ratatoille on the same plate, piled one on top of the other, was acceptable, normal and edible. Please believe me when I promise you that it was none of these things.

Vaguely queasy, the only thing to be done was to arrange the mush on my plate into a big smiley face, call it modern art (man with chips for eyes, chicken for hair, and a terrible skin disease), and promise myself that I'd learn to cook...