Hellsborough Exposed — hellsborough-food-and-drink

Somebody named the demonspawn as a joke, or in a bad night's fright, and the name outlived the joke entirely — it's a cow. Black-and-rust, cloven-footed, chewing its way round the same worn droveway it walked yesterday, and I've eaten it more than once without losing much sleep over the choice. What the name gets right isn't the animal, it's what the animal does to a person standing near it without lifting a hoof: the smell arrives first, sulphur and old meat, a stench of decay with no business coming off something still breathing, and then the call, dragged up out of somewhere lower than a lung. None of that is dangerous at murklight — I've walked past working bulls with nothing worse than a long stare for my trouble. What I won't do, and what nobody sensible does either, is stand between a demonspawn and its byre in the hour either side of murkfall, when the gates go narrow and whatever wariness the farming bred out of it all day comes straight back. Every placid, slow-eyed one chewing scran in a Loxley fold is descended, a few careful generations back, from something out past the last working wall that's never agreed to any of this — and somewhere among that wild stock, old enough that nobody farming today has laid eyes on it and lived to describe more than the horns, is supposed to stand the oldbrownhorn.

Lost in a murk so heavy I could not see two feet, I blundered into a farmer's field and a snarl of barbed wire, and was collected by the owner himself, one of those increasingly rare humans who still work the Dark Peak. He kept me talking in an accent broader than Van's, then sat me in his sparse kitchen and fed me warm fresh demonspawn milk and salted wooltard shank, both of them, I have to report, delicious. He sells the rest of his produce to The Nascenti, who process it into biofeed for the pop; I never got his name, but I have a feeling our paths will cross again.

Best taproom on the Middlewood Road was heaving the night the DPDC jellyheads went on strike — nothing empties a workshop and fills a bar quite like a grievance. Van was already sat there with a pint stood waiting for me, the way he always is, and I have never once worked out how he knows the exact hour I will walk in. I bought the next round regardless; spending keeps the wheels turning, and anyroad, if the strikers do not rein their necks in the Exacid will be down on them long before last orders.

A new bar opening in Hellsborough presents a genuine crisis of allegiance, for one is honour-bound to keep supporting bar number one even as the newcomer quietly monopolises one's evenings. Drinking here is less a pastime than a standing feature of the week, and I confess it has rather run away with my time of late.

Shad proposed food somewhere around 4AM and was outvoted without discussion. The Farantees Hyper-mart on the Great Northern Causeway was the only option at that hour, and while it is technically open, something about the stock between murkneet and murkrise gives even Van Hallam pause — which is, as a rule of thumb, sufficient deterrent.

rooter flesh has a dedicated psycmask advertisement — arriving mid-conversation, unannounced, describing the experience of eating it with the sensory enthusiasm of something that has been told what enthusiasm is. Rooterskin scratchings are available as a bar snack; Van Hallam orders them without reflection and notes they are "all protein." What the protein was before it became a scratching is not a question the advertisement addresses.

The bar is where everything happens — deals, gossip, Cribbage, and Van pulling Crickerjacks off the air mid-sentence. Music you didn't ask for. Ale you did. That's your evening sorted.