As I said in my last
post, the stag do could make a whole post in and of itself. In fact, now that I have been through the
many a voluminous pictures that emerged, it's going to make three.
Basically, the best man
organising the stag, Greg, knows how much I like food. He also clearly likes me enough to make it a
good stag, rather than one of these horrific booze-and-strippers events in
Ashford. So that was a relief.
I was given my marching
orders: London Bridge at 9.45 am. For
what I did not know. So, with not just a
little foreboding, I made my way towards Borough Market where I was greeted by
a gang of my closest mates and a dude with a lot of very big and sharp
knives.
No, seriously.
Fortunately,
this man was Andrew "Farmer" Sharp, and he was to teach us a thing or
two about butchery.
The unfortunate victim of the day was a muntjac, a kind of small deer that is widely considered to be a pest on Britain's shores.
Having kicked off his
career as a butcher from the tender age of 13, Farmer Sharp (who, it turns out, is no farmer – the name was appointed to him by a long standing customer who
assumed that, wearing a flat cap and selling meat, he simply must be a farmer)
knows what he's talking about – both in terms of the meat and the butchery. After a brief lesson about knives – what's
best to buy, how to sharpen blades and general knife care, we set about the
beast with reckless abandon.
At the end, when we'd all taken a turn in carving away – and very well done to him for making sure that the butchery was evenly spread amongst all 20 of us chaps – Farmer Sharp set about cleaning and tidying up our hacked about efforts, and finishing off the parts we hadn't done. It was a wonder to behold – his working over of the final parts of the carcass was like watching a dance, so fluid and swift and precise were his movements.
The service Farmer
Sharp offers is fantastic. He's great
with a bunch of lads for a stag do (although, clearly, one has to lay off the
drink until after you've finished mucking about with the knives – if you don’t have
that kind of restraint, why not go paintballing instead, eh?). He's funny, a good teacher and a very easy
going person, which makes him great for these kind of informal but informative
sessions. He's keen to kick off a new
strand to his butchery class business by running corporate social events, which
I think would be a fantastic thing to do and very different to the usual dross
you get at those sorts of do's. All the
best to him, I say.
And what to do with all
that meat? Well, come back in a few days to find out...
- GrubsterBoy -