I studied sciences at university for about six months when I was a teenager. I had planned to do it for four years but I hadn't taken into account how boring it would be and how many other things I could get up to when I left home to live on a university campus. I now know that what I really wanted to be was an environmental scientist, but the concept had yet to be invented and I had to study zoology, botany, chemistry and biology seperately, starting at the molecular and cellular level and working upwards. It would have taken years before we had learned enough to be allowed to put up nest boxes, collect bugs in jars and look under stones in rock pools like I did as a kid. Half way through the first year my friend Simon and I thought, 'Stuff this. Let's pack it in.' Nobody noticed until the end of the year and we got to keep the rooms in the campus flats and the student grants until then.
Sometime during that year, either before or after we formally chucked the uni, but I can't remember for sure, Simon and I were invited to a bunch of other guys' flat for a Mexican meal. They had got hold of a cookbook and bought a couple of bottles of tequila, some lemons and a case of Mexican beer. By the time everything was almost cooked and most of the beer was finished, someone noticed that they had forgot to put the kidney beans into the chilli con carne. The only other item that hadn't been added to a dish as an ingredient was a single large tomato so it seemed right to do something with the last of the ingredients. There's only so much you can do with a can of beans and a tomato, but even so the chosen option was probably the least sophisticated. The resulting dish was none the less tasty for that. I ate most of it since I was the only veggie and my choice was limited and it could have been the beer, the tequila or the low-grade bogweed we were pretending was Acapulco Gold, but I remember stuffing a taco shell full of mashed beans, sour cream and lettuce and tomato salad into my face and thinking it was one of the best things I'd ever tasted.