Hog roast catering around Heathrow is fun – and always interesting. Yesterday we catered for a wedding, and today our first job was to deliver a hog roast machine to a local pub. The clients were celebrating their engagement. We loaded the hog roast machine into our van and drove off. We parked outside the pub and Bailey pushed the machine inside while Derek held open the door. The couple were fairly young, not long out of university They were friendly and pleasant to talk to. I plugged in the machine and noticed they had a hog roast ready on a table. Me and my team member Kirsty helped them lift it into the machine.
I got chatting to the couple for a bit, and learned that they'd met in a club while they were students in the city. A graduation, one kid, two moves and two jobs each later, they were ready to get hitched. The bride to be laughed as she told me “it was like one of those chick flick movies – we just kept pretending it wasn't the right time yet, that we weren't right for each other. I wanted to fly solo.” They had put off moving in together until the groom to be had complained about how far he had to travel to see his son. And, in the best traditions of romantic comedy, they had fallen in love and now were about to tie the knot. Who said romance is dead? I see it all around me, every day. But then, I'm an insufferable optimist (or so I've been told, by a friend of mine who also works in the catering industry).
They also told me that the groom was a social worker in the city while the bride was a local teacher who also gave keyboard lessons and taught bellydancing classes on the side. She had a gift for teaching, apparently, and all her pupils loved her. She teaches both tribal fusion and Egyptian bellydancing.
“I can also play the piano, but I prefer the keyboard,” she said.
We said our goodbyes and left to carry out our second job of the day: delivering a hog roast machine to a community centre in one of the other villages. It wasn't a long drive, and I found myself relaxing as Kirsty drove, half listening to an old mix CD I'd made years ago. We had been to this community centre before – once to cater for a birthday party and once for a retirement party. That was several months ago – maybe years back for the retirement party.
We got to the place and soon we were inside, checking that the machine was working properly. The clients were celebrating the anniversary of their gardening society. I've hired and catered to similar events in the past – anniversaries or launches of book clubs, art groups, literature or dance societies; political groups. A lot of them have been in the Heathrow villages. A lot more goes on in a village than city people tend to think. We see it all here at hog roast Heathrow. My job is fun and rewarding and ideal for a chatterbox like me. I love catering and I would never change my job, not for anything.
