The curious case of the pheasant in the flat...

The Jolly Blogger gave Ben and i a brace of dead pheasants last Saturday at a birthday party which was brilliant, i love pheasant. I had had some from him before and they were beautiful and the stew i made went down a treat. We also had a friend to stay that particular weekend who enjoyed a drink and coming home that night we were all a little drunk and very merry. As we came into the flat, dead pheasants in hand the friend demanded we hung them up. Now the usual hanging time for a brace of pheasant is around a week. More if you like the meat gamey. I don't like it gamey at all and was happy to butcher the damn things the next day but our friend was having none of it.

The next 15 minutes still remains a mystery to Ben but i recall very clearly he and the friend running into each room with a pair of dead birds on a bit of string trying to hang them up. Bathroom, Bens room, my room until the boys found our cupboard. It's not quite a airing cupboard due to the lack of a boiler but it does have the pipes connected to the central heating in there. It makes that small, enclosed space very hot and humid. I forgot to mention that our friend is a nancy boy.

All weekend he had us put the heating on as high as possible (which means Ben and i's central heating game where we were going to try and leave the heating off till January is ruined might i add) because he was chilly. The man lives Scotland for christs sake!

I digress.

Fastforward to the following Friday night, i had had a few two many beers with friends and stumbled home. As i walked into the flat i remember thinking that something smelled not right but i thought no more about it until Saturday morning. I woke up and opened the door to the most almighty stench. I assumed Ben had done a rather offensive poo that morning before work but as i walked into the bathroom the smell disappeared. I walked out, gingerly opened the cupboard door and retched. The smell hit me like thrown bowling ball. That coupled with my mighty hangover did not set me up in the best of moods.

Assuming this is what pheasant smelled like when kept indoors rather than out (we always hung ours by the back door outside) i went ahead and started to pluck and butcher the birds with a bucket to one side for the retching. I felt less and less confident as the meat seemed spoilt but i ploughed on until i boxed up and stored the meat in the freezer and put the carcass in the bin down stairs, subsequently locking myself out of the flat in my PJ shorts and PGL hoody. Not pretty.

Today is Tuesday and every time that freezer door has opened week i can smell the meat. It's hard to describe the smell but i think baby poo and hangover farts is probably best. I gave in and threw the breasts away which broke my heart, i had managed to ruin nice, free meat. Still, this is not the end of the story.

I discovered i needed toilet paper earlier on this evening, opened the cupboard and the smell was still there, i scanned the area and realised there was blood and "something else" all down the wall, on those hot metal pipes mentioned before, and in the carpet. That explains why the smell was particularity pungent.

I think we have all learnt something from this.

Don't store dead animals in an enclosed, hot space
Don't let drunk friends hang birds
Don't forget you have dead birds in your hot, enclosed space
Don't butcher animals hungover
If it smells bad, it is bad
Don't ruin perfectly good food with your idiocy.

End.