Eating Mammals Book

"Witty, bizarre tales with ridiculous descriptions of appetite and girth. First, we have the professional eater: One evening, after a particularly successful show in which he had performed a routine entitled Americana (forty-eight hot dogs, one for each star; thirteen slices of apple pie, one for each stripe; twenty-eight cups of punch, one for each president; and a brandy for Lincoln), he was approached by a thin, fragile man who spoke in a strange accent, and who had the eves of someone who expects yes for an answer. Laden with a stomach full of borrowed patriotism, yet happy with his performance, Michael listened with great interest to the proposal.And the gypsy:Inside, sitting in an armchair which seemed to occupy the whole far end of the caravan, was an enormous woman. 'Well! Come on! Let's have a look!' she said, bursting into life and hauling herself some inches up from her seat. But she flopped straight back down; the idea of getting up had been a bad one. So there she sat. And there seemed to be no end to her. Instead, there was a general movement of things which must have belonged to her body in some way. She spilled over the arms of the chair and out on to the floor in rolls and odd-shaped dollops of woman, and spread up behind her own shoulder, upwards and outwards, in all directions. She seemed to be nothing more than a big fat face grafted on to the back half of the caravan's chintz interior, her flabby mouth speaking not for a human being but as a mouthpiece for the whole dwelling.And the policemen with a new cat:For three weeks at Dewsbury Central Police Station, food and affection were in limitless supply. Each morning a mountain of breakfast scraps was put down for the new visitor, and throughout the day there was a never-ending series of meals and snacks and elevenses and tea breaks. The Dewsbury Constabulary, it seemed, marched on its stomach, and there were some substantial ones. Hardly an hour passed without the laying down of newspapers and pencils for a fresh round of gorging, always washed down with sweet tea, and always a saucer of it put down for the cat. The poor thing had no choice but to leave whole plates of titbits untouched, and this eventually served as a gentle hint that a cat's needs are really quite modest in comparison to a policeman's."