Scott McKenzie settled on his bar stool and looked out at his team of eight staff: all under twenty-five,  all  dressed  in  white  denim  jeans  and  corporate  baseball  caps,  all  of  them desperate to be anywhere but here, the Sunday lunch-time shift at Loco Caliente, a Tex-Mex restaurant on the Kentish Town Road where both food and atmosphere were hot hot hot.

Now before we open the doors for brunch I‘d just like to run through today‘s so-called ―specials‖, if I may. Our soup is that repeat offender, the sweetcorn chowder, and the main course is a very delicious and succulent fish burrito!‘

Scott  blew  air  out  through  his  mouth  and  waited  for  the  groaning  and  fake  retching  to subside.  A small,  pale  pink-eyed  man  with  a  degree  in  Business  Management  from Loughborough,  he  had  once  hoped  to  be  a  captain  of  industry.  He  had  pictured  himself playing golf at conference centres or striding up the steps of a private jet, and yet just this morning he had scooped a plug of yellow pork fat the size of a human head from the kitchen drains. With his bare hands. He could still feel the grease between his fingers. He was thirty-nine years old, and it wasn‘t meant to be this way.

Basically,  it‘s  your  standard  beef-stroke-chicken-stroke-pork  burrito  but  with,  and  I quote, ―delicious moist chunks of cod and salmon‖. Who knows, they may even get a prawn or two.‘

That‘s  just . . .  awful,‘  laughed  Paddy  from  behind  the  bar,  where  he  sat  cutting  limes into wedges for the necks of beer bottles.

Bringing a little touch of the North Atlantic to the cuisine of Latin America,‘ said Emma Morley, tying on her waitress‘s  apron and noticing a new arrival appearing behind Scott, a large, sturdy man, fair curly hair on a large cylindrical head. The new boy. The staff watched him warily, weighing him up as if he were a new arrival on G-wing. 

On a brighter note,‘ said Scott, ‗I‘d like to introduce you to Ian Whitehead, who will be joining our happy team  of highly trained staff.‘  Ian slapped his regulation baseball cap far back on his head and, raising an arm in salute, high-fived the air. ‗Yo, my people!‘ he said, in what might have been an American accent.

Yo my people?  Where does Scott find  them?‘ sniggered Paddy from behind the bar, his voice calibrated just loud enough for the new arrival to hear.