All You Can Eat

Well, we're back in the 'fact imitating fiction' department with a recent story in The Guardian about a German restaurant which is advertising for people to donate 'spare' body parts for them to serve up to 'cannibal' diners. This all sounds suspiciously like a story called Suburban Cannibals I wrote for The Sleaze a few years ago. This featured a cannibal restaurant in London, where diners could pick their meal from a group of unfortunate prisoners held in a cage in the corner, who would then have various limbs cut off and cooked. It's nice to know that someone is reading my stuff, even if it is a bunch of German cannibals. Perhaps I could get in touch with this restaurant and ask for royalties. That said, they aren't actually proposing to cut bits off of live subjects. Obviously. Even in Germany that might just be illegal. Mind you, by asking for body part donations they could well be encouraging every self-harmer in the country to lop bits off of themselves. Depending on what they pay, they could even be encouraging a spate of illegal organ snatching - unsuspecting victims could be drugged in seedy bars, only to awaken in an even seedier hotel room, minus a kidney or a couple of lobes off of their liver.

What is it with Germans and cannibalism, though? If ever there's a story in the papers about cannibals, you can guarantee it concerns Germans, whether it is restaurants serving human flesh or cannibals advertising for willing victims on the web, (then eating their penises). Is urban cannibalism their new signature crime? I mean, there does seem to be a trend for national crimes: the Belgians seem to favour child abductions and murders, the Austrians like a bit of kidnap imprisonment and incest, whilst the US specialises in serial killers. I'm not entirely sure what our favourite type of crime is in the UK. Drunken thuggery? Actually, we do seem to have a penchant for murdering prostitutes, whether it is by strangling them in East Anglia, or shooting them with crossbows in Leeds. Maybe it's a heritage thing. After all, Jack the Ripper was doing it back in the 1880s. Getting back to the cannibalism, it never seems to have really taken off in this country - we're British, damn it! It's one thing to bludgeon someone to death, but a gentleman would never eat them, for goodness sake. Not without removing one's hat first, at the very least. That said, I can actually think of a couple of cannibal killings in the UK in recent years. But it never caught on. Nevertheless, it remains a popular subject - the story I mentioned earlier still gets a steady flow of traffic. So much so that I've been toying with an idea for another cannibal story, perhaps based around that awful Come Dine With Me series on Channel Four. Time will tell if it's a viable story idea.