There’s a nail salon two blocks down from where I live, calls itself “Sandals Nail Salon.” A grassy ‘S’ is what they use as their logo, and it hangs on their front window like toperay in free fall. It hangs right between the words “Salon” and “Nails.” I wonder how many malacologists they get waltzing in their, asking to be shown the goods, leaving with pampered nails that would fill at least three product review videos.

Every Friday night, for the last three years, I call up “So Good Chinese.” The name speaks for itself. It sits snug between “@24/7” and “Yum Yum” – friendly competition. I’m not poking fun at Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, or any of the hundreds of non-English speaking countries. Please keep speaking non-English, you outnumber the muddy self-obsessed romance that these whitey-tighty wearing nations think is poetic linguistics. I am poking fun at mistranslations, simple harmless and glorious misunderstandings of the language that, as I drag my legs through the shlop of life, make me smile.

Smiling makes sinking in the shlop less terrifying.

I hope my last words before I die are, “Gosh that shlop is funny.” I’ve known too many people who’s last words were, “Nooooo ArraRRrghg the shlop is everywhere – grey, hot, it sticks to my arms. My arms! I can’t move my arms, please God bring me back I regret everything. Why didn’t I quite my job even after thirty years of dribble day in and day out.” I think those people didn’t get a chance to laugh more.

Laughter is a frame or reference. Puffer fish. Those are funny. Druptart. That’s a funny word. Child poisoned by puffer fish. Silence in the audience for that one. Puffer fish meets tragic end when snorkelling child munches it down. I chuckled.

So when I say that mistranslation is a free medicine for piping some endorphins around that wet, flabby, imperfect, and blemished body you inhabit – I’m asking you to do some work. Spin the plot in your head until the story becomes a comedic arc fit for Broadway.

A man, born in a small village in Eastern China aspires to becoming a chef, to owning the best Chinese restaurant on the parts of the Earth that have habitable land. His parents reassure him daily that he needs to keep his gaze at the ground, tow the cart, spick-spank the pigs, and hoe the fields, he doesn’t have that kind of money. Ten years, a handful of diplomas and degrees, and he falls into the promised land.

Leachkin, a small town, west of Inverness. Buried so deep in the gales, looks out on a tundra of treeless, sheer rock faces that growl if you get too near. Scotland. The man is beyond ecstatic, he’s made it. Thirty years of being a flesh bound, conscious bug in a universe that has only to wince and him, his genetic history, the fossils of the first lifeforms, the entire Milky Way, goes kaput.

Plans begin to shape, blueprints are stained with coffee rings, friends are made then called, then lost, women are won and lost, and woks are tossed. Then a generous loan comes in from the Royal Bank of Scotland, they will offer him forty-thousand shiny ones a month. Twenty-percent APR. He’s never seen four zeros on a check without a decimal place cleaving them in two. He takes a sip from his supply of ecstatic juice.

A friend comes round one evening, two months before the scheduled opening, wine in one hand, a handshake in the other. The friend wants to celebrate, to reflect on how far he’s come. They both arrived to the promised land together, both bonded over how much shlop they’d had to wade through already in their lives. George was from near Glasgow, Ken was from a small town in China that George couldn’t pronounce, so he never said it.

George sat like someone had put a pile of bricks on a chair and then spread sausage all over it to make it fleshy. His hands were lifting hooks, also smothered with sausage; he was planting them both on Ken’s dining table. “Well chief,” George said, “you’ve only gone and done it lad.”

Ken sat like he’d never slouched and was proud, like he marked every day on the calendar with a red tick when he didn’t slouch and had thirty calendars, bright red. “George, thank you. Thank you for coming. I am so pleased.”

“Nay bother ol’ buddy, nay bother. You’ll be joining the ranks real soon with your masterpiece. A man like you – with the brains you got,” George poked a finger at Ken so large it punched the air. “With the brains you got, mate, you’ll be the next fran-chise.” George sounded out syllables when he wanted people to focus on certain words.

Ken blushed a professional blush. He was sharply dressed for a special occasion: another day. Every day was a special occasion to Ken. “George. Thank you, for all your support and –“

“Yady yady! Enough o’ that. Let’s toast.” And he swung out two corking cups of white wine – a traditional favourite of Ken’s. His mother always toasted with it.

“Now laddy,” George said, grinning a mouth full of golf tees. “What’ve ya named it? What’s the deed under, geez us the name so I can remember this moment, look back fondly when I’m a sage ol’ gaff in some nook of a pub, yammering on ‘bout the first time I heard the words. The words. The words that would cripple a nation, bring it to its economic knees under the weight of gastronomical intellect so incredible that the UN gets in there and says, ‘Hang about – what’s all this? We cannae’ be havin’ aromas so po-tent, flavours so orgas-mic, that the world cannae’ function. We gotta shut this operation down.’

“Make me cry, Ken. The day those pearl gates swing open for me, God will ask, ‘Son. Every man that has stood before this gate here, this glorious arch o’ gold, has welled up like a seabed at high tide. But you, son, you I see nay a drop in the eye. Why?’

“To which I will reply – and mark these words Ken – I won’t stammer a beat, ‘God, almighty, all righteous, all seeing, and all-oof, your gates are wonderful, aye, but I cannae’ pretend they are nay the gates to which the beauty is so great my eyes water to protect ‘em selves. Aye, those gates nay be the ones, for that I reserve for something far greater.’

“And God will say, ‘Why! To what is it possible to possess beauty more than these gates?’

“And I will say, ‘Why God, that is reserved for the restaurant of my pal Ken.’

“And God will reply, ‘What is the name of this restaurant, with beauty that exceeds these fragile metals carved by the tongues of angels?’

“And to th-at I will say...” Here George punched the air with his chubby finger again. Punched it right at Ken.

Ken, upright, never slouched a degree in his life, sipping wine with both hands, Ken met George’s grimace with his small smile. He said, “So Good Chinese.”