Virginity is overrated but when it comes to fast food, the type you pick up in a bag and escape furtively in the car with, I may yet be the equivalent of the fourteen year old who ends up pregnant the first time she fooled around with her ‘uncle’ next door. Then married him.

I went to Burger King and I, splutter, almost liked it.

On a Friday night, well into too many hours of work straight past the Voices concert without passing go or collecting 200 changes of clothing, the prospect of eating crap had to be balanced out with the strong possibility of eating nothing at all. ‘We have lampuki fillets in the fridge. They only take a couple of minutes to fry’ I told The Writer as we walked the four hundred and eighty seven miles to where we’d parked the car. We had been fearful of Valletta resident reprisals but as it were, some nice dealer had left his pimped out white Mercedes next to ours so it felt right at home. ‘Will you cook them?’ he asked ‘No’ I replied, ever the dutiful wife.

‘We could go to Charlie’s’ [at Horza] I insisted, stomach literally rumbling so much the band master may have been considering it as an extra instrument. ‘It’s 11pm’ The Writer said ‘That’s no decent time to walk into a restaurant’. ‘Well, true that’ I answered in my ghetto voice.

In the car, I positioned my spine against the old-people-with-bad-backs-who-drive-a-sports-car-with-bucket-seats-but-should-be-in-a-sedan cushion and ruminated the idea of eating nothing. I couldn’t. On the way up through the road to the airport, as we competed with 200 empty taxis all racing like crazy as if they actually had passengers waiting to be picked up, I told the writer.

‘Let’s go to McDonald’s’.

There are moments in life which in police accident reports eventually listed as ‘The driver lost control of his car’ and commented on by the usual idiots and their ‘speed’ theories but the effect of these words on TW was almost soporific. He slowed down. ‘Are you serious?’ he asked me. ‘Erm...kinda!’ I replied, completely embarrassed and glad the car was dark (we never got those purple all-‘round lights for the cabin).

‘I won’t go to MacDonald’s’ he said ‘But I will go to Burger King’.

There are defining moments in couples’ relationships where a mere utterance seals their fate together forever: for some it is killing the mother-in-law and burying her in the back garden. For others it is having a child. For us, it was the concession of making ‘use’ of one of the ‘rubbish’-selling outlets dotted inside our only airport.  It was that, an ‘all for €5’ kebab house in Marsa or the infamous nine hundred ingredient pizza in Bir id-Deheb.

We plonked the car in a tow zone where, to our knowledge, wardens fear to thread after 11.30pm. We approached from above. At almost midnight the airport itself was empty yet the ‘food court’ or whatever it’s called was so popular, it was shocking. Moreover, most of the people walking out with bags of stuff in their hands and gigantic cups of soft-drinks and ‘milk’ shakes were obese, so they populated the area even more with sheer size. I’m not talking about a couple of sausage thighs, some muffin tops or a beer belly. This was serious ‘you need a doctor’ and ‘buy 4 seats on a plane’ stuff. Heard of the ‘in every fat person there is a thin person waiting to come out’ (I invented it)? Well, in these people there were at least four other humans.

It took us no less than 15 minutes to place our order. ‘I thought this was fast food!’ I told TW, who was, by now, completely ignoring me, enthralled, as all the boys at the counter were, by the girl serving.  I am positive, in fact, that if it weren’t for her, they would have gone to any other outlet and got practically the same thing, but this lovely was seriously oh-my-goddish in her disgustingly ugly nylon uniform and that cap every McJob makes you wear. She was also wearing a very funny contraption, also called a bra, which pushed her considerable-sized boobs together in the middle of her chest, like a couple of oranges strung like a huge pendant.

‘Rajtek ir-rahal id-darba l-ohra. Ma rajtnix! Mur ghidli li ha tkun hawn’ [I saw you at the village last time. You didn’t see me. I didn’t know you’d be here] lied the 19-year old boy in front of me, as excited as if he were in front of Maria Grazia Cucinotta in Il Postino. I have translated but only those who know the vernacular will have any idea of what this means in teen language.  He bought some idiotic meal and spent what to me seemed like a ridiculous amount of money (€7.50) but his satisfaction knew no bounds. ‘Ah I’m so busy I’m crumbling!’ she smiled, not crumbling at all ‘University in the morning, then teaching children to dance, then I’ve been here since 5pm and I’ll be here until 1am. I’m so exhausted’.  Lord almighty: it was all the poor boy could do but stop himself from ripping all his clothes off and flying behind the counter to give her a full body massage using only melted ‘cheese’.

My target was slightly different. I was scanning the pictures and trying to figure out what the difference was between one burger and another. There was something called an XXL, another called a Whopper and myriad other permutations of what appeared to be the same thing. Since my knowledge of this stuff comes from books like McLibel and Supersize Me as well as the infamous conversation in Pulp Fiction, there I was, a battered fried fish out of flavoured water.

I waited and waited until Pendant Boobs could speak back to me. She finally did. ‘What is the biggest burger?’ I asked her, trying to keep it all simple. Her eyes opened wide. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. Now I don’t know about you, but size is not relative in these things is it? It counts for something, doesn’t it?

‘Erm…you know…are they all the same height?’ ‘Yeah! Sure! They’re all the same’ she replied, obviously wondering what on earth this middle-aged woman standing in front of her with this man staring the other way were trying to do to her an hour before her shift was up. I looked back at the pictures. ‘So the XXL is the same size as the Whopper?’ ‘Well, it’s wider’, she said patiently.

I ordered an XXL with no cheese, trying to keep the whole industrial food thing as far away as I could. TW took a double whopper. ‘Get me a meal’ he said. ‘A meal?!’ I hissed. ‘You know it’s just a way for them to make more money and it really is not good value for money.’ My ever-patient husband gave in. ‘Ok then. Just the chips’.

We walked out with two brown bags, marked, on the inside with ‘B’ and another letter. There’s a language to this stuff and we had never studied it. The ‘B’ turned out to be anything connected to the Whopper (grilled! Not fried! Hey!). We rushed home.

It is important, in order to experience this as it should be, not to re-heat the food. Also, ideas of using real crockery were out, as was cutlery. After all, the whole thought process behind fast food is that it can be eaten with one hand.

I packed a few strings of ‘fries’ (they are not called chips any more) into my mouth. We had no salt and pepper and had to ridiculously add the only thing available in the house: fleur de sel and freshly ground. Nonetheless, I had already tried them by this time and I have to admit they were very good. The oil they are fried in (fried! Not grilled!) was flavoured in such a way as to make the salt and pepper obsolete. They had a crisp outer which managed to remain slightly warm for the best part of half an hour. There was no inside as they are as fat as a string.

The burger itself was quite fabulous. Yes, the height was stupid, half as much as the picture shows: in fast food, the lower the height, the quicker the patty, erm, grills. This also means that there is no possibility of a raw inner part, any idea of ‘pink’, potential balking by those who have no idea of what a tartare means and therefore no lawsuits.

The cheese was there, melting industrially all over. It was inoffensive. The best part of the burger was the obviously very studied array of toppings: iceberg lettuce, slices of tomato, gherkin and probably ketchup and mayonnaise. It needed absolutely nothing to be added to it. The bread was the usual cake-like so-soft-you-can-eat-it-with-no-teeth type. I thoroughly and ridiculously enjoyed it. Moreover, unlike the Micky D’s I remember from way back I actually felt sated afterwards, rather than got another craving within ten minutes.

‘This is actually good’ I exclaimed to TW, sitting next to me watching the Food Channel and stuffing his face whopperly. ‘Of course it is!’ he replied, probably wondering which era his wife emanated from. There are a few years between the two of us, but if you want to feel the whole gamut of a generation gap, then I suggest you go to Burger King for a takeaway; just don’t come crying to me later about the Botox shots you needed to get over it.