Stuart Campbell

Except that I personally, possessed of superhuman strength, was only laid up by the food poisoning for 24 hours, and was in fact mighty enough to both reach the bathroom and vomit repeatedly into the proper receptacle, and also crawl into the living room in order to drink Lemsip through a straw while lying on the floor, not quite able to sit up for more than a few seconds or lift the mug to my face.

I believe we had sausage, egg and chips. And a milkshake.

J Nash

That exonerates the milkshake then as the SINISTER INFILTRAINSTATION OF BACTERIAL THUGSSASSINS because I wouldn't have had one. The only milkshake I've drunk ever was in the cafe opposite Old Orleans when the cafe was a 1950s retro bar thing.

(This doesn't particularly narrow down the experimentational moment as the cafe lease changed hands something like 935 times, but it was shortly after SFX ish 1 came out.)

Encouraged to try a milkshake by an adjacent chum, I did so. It was reasonably horrible. Several days later I was accosted in town, miles away from the cafe, by the bartender in mufti, who accused me of running away without paying, despite the fact we strolled out in a hipster stylee after participating in the cafe's 50s-theme activities (a knife fight, foiling an alien invasion, and being photographed by K Russell on a bomb site), settling the bill with the exact same bloke.

Disappointingly this groundless accusation did not escalate into a chase like that featured in the fantastic A Sayle short story about the unpaid restaurant tab. The bartender, after following me for a few steps heckling my protestations, turned and walked into a shop instead and the cafe closed down for the 936th time a little later. (Not that the two events were associated, unless the bartender forgot where he worked and was waiting confused at the back of the shop for a couple of weeks shaking a frothing canister, I suppose.)

Anyway, I would have thrown off the gurgling germs in a few minutes with nothing more than six light coughs, but I'd recently beaten a lion to death with my thumbs and forded a rapids.