Not long now.

R.I.P. O.B.

Just before we closed, on the busiest night of service Cilijn has ever suffered, we also had Mark and his HUGE LIGHT on the other side of the counter. He made the food look significantly better than it does from our angle. If you require moving images for your food service establishment, bar-mitzvah, terrorist organisation, or tinder profile, give him a call.

NANIKA will return after this commercial break.

Thank you for calling, please hold.

Adieu, Allison Street.

We would like to thank you, as always, for being wonderful customers. From those of you that only know us from the bun shack to those who have been coming to Nanika for years (and a few that have been around since the old Something days), I tell every potential new hire that there is not an establishment with a better clientele in the city. It is a genuine pleasure seeing you every week, and it has been a very refreshing six months of actually getting to hear what you're saying instead of watching your lips move while the roar of the extractor fills my ears. Cilijn and I will return in November sometime, back up the road at Nanika, where I look forward to teaching her the joys of Mexican ramen, and also serving it to you, ardent fans of GOAT MEAT that you are.

We will be open on Allison Street today from roughly 1pm until we run out of buns and/or the will to live, then we will close The Flap for good. Come get a mango cannoli and say goodbye to the cutest hatch on the block.

Is it the fog of war, or the mists of confusion that drape these sodden streets and the thoughts of those that walk them?

Well well well, wasn't that a proper Friday night? Cilijn has never had one of those. I myself had almost forgotten the feeling, so long have I been been toiling in this adorable, steamy, yet not particularly busy mine.

So, despite some minor panic and an hour or two of non-stop motion we have both survived to serve you once again. I also managed to make cannoli filling on the fly at 6:40pm in the five minute gap between two checks, so there will be mango cannoli out the proverbial wazoo this evening. There is a haddock shortage in town, so kedgeree buns are on the endangered species list at the moment but I will make a run when Cilijn gets to work and see if I can find some more. Everything else is, I believe, fully stocked up and ready to go, but of course the winds of fate are fickle and bring often tragedy to those who sail under their power, so it's best to call ahead and pre-order for collection to avoid any disappointment.

Either way, the days of the bun shack are almost over. Come on down and say goodbye.

The digital tongue, forever forked, weaving a tapestry to drape over unsightly reality.

JOIN US ONE LAST WEEKEND (and Thursday, which is like ... an honorary weekend day depending on how employed you are) DOWN AT THE BUN SHACK. We have all the hottest human food items! Buns! Wakame! Korean Taco Bowls! So many aubergines you will shit your pants! From excitement, not food poisoning!

We have POTATO SALAD for the spice averse! Black Pepper Sausages! Red Chicken Curry! Cannoli the size of your penis! We hope! I have just been informed we will not have the cannoli until Friday! That's BREAKING NEWS! Come on down to the BUN SHACK we have BREAKING NEWS!

We hope you have enjoyed this smaller, cuter version of NANIKA, complete with things humans enjoy, such as Kedgeree Buns! Salt & Chilli Tofu! Actual conversation! A Dutch girl! ZERO MURDERS (a new record)! Kimchi Noodle Salad! Etc!



Four more days until we disappear into the wind, like a whisper of a better possible future, forgotten as soon as it is spoken aloud.

"... even the outraged mobs are screaming on autopilot. Even genuine crises can’t interrupt the tedium of it all, the bad jokes and predictable thinkpieces, spat-out enzymes to digest the world."

As we quickly approach the oft-anticipated return to chicken katsu and mildly numbing pork mince, we need to round out the roster.

We have full or part time availability for people who actually like to work at work, a dying art in the modern dystopia, I know.

I'm thinking of just sharpening six cleavers, dropping all applicants down the hatch and letting the most determined one clamber out to receive their apron. I Will post Cilijn at the top to crush the fingers of those who attempt to escape. She will, of course, do this while also chopping spring onions because she knows how to multitask.

Do you know anyone? I will give you £50 worth of free food if you provide me with a decent employee. That's like ... four full meals here because we are a shining beacon of value and affordability.

If the poor believe that their condition can be improved by judicious entry into the systems of power, who stands in genuine opposition to those systems?

It's all in The Book, as my religious aunt used to say whenever I had some foolish youthful question like "Why is the sky blue?" or "When can I eat?" or "Why did you handcuff me to this radiator and why is it so dark down here?"

I am alone all day/night, so apologies in advance if I start to take your order and then bolt over the counter, knocking you to the pavement in a breathless rush as I vault through the hatch and sprint down Allison Street into the wet night air, never to be seen again by man nor beast.

In that event, I give you full permission to raid the fridges and take home whatever cannoli filling or pork products you find, lest they eventually spoil and go to waste.

It's the dumbest of sports.

"Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group."

What a week.

What a year, really.

What a time to be alive!

If you think about it, we had two whole years wherein almost every human being on the planet was sharing a common experience. Two years of social and societal interruption where mass-communication made possible the steady and near-complete connection of the majority of the globe, and would have provided, had we thought to make any steps in that direction, an absolutely unprecedented opportunity for large-scale change in just about any category you can name.

We could have done anything. Having the collective attention of a room is difficult. Getting the collective attention of a country takes something like a couple of planes destroying two occupied skyscrapers in the largest civilian metropolis available, or Russia invading. Getting the world's attention, and holding it for longer than an instant is, barring alien invasion, almost impossible.

And we had two years to really come together and discuss the world we wanted to emerge from our chrysalis of fear to find waiting for us. To examine the structures that rule and restrict and make adjustments or rubble of them. To look at ourselves, and our effects on others, and reframe our wants and desires around collective good instead of personal greed, toward industry and away from sloth, to edify and organise and prepare for a new and bright future humbled and grateful for the opportunity to gain perspective and wisdom despite the circumstances of the gift.



I remember they had to get traffic wardens for Govanhill because there was such an insane queue when McDonald's reopened.

That's actually my strongest memory from the entire experience.

And look at us now. Look how far we have come. You could turn on your laptop and livestream the war in Europe but that would take precious electricity you can't spare lest you fall behind in your obscenely inflated utility bills, and you wouldn't want to lose the flat you share with five other people because Winter is coming and even though you can't afford to heat the place you know that rent has tripled since you moved in so you can't exactly afford to get a new flat either, which is something you worry about while waiting for an underpaid migrant to come deliver your dinner on his bike in the pissing rain for what amounts to slave wages (but at least he will appreciate the Black Lives Matter poster in your window, knowing that you care about his welfare). Meanwhile, you can hop on that phone made by child labour in a country you couldn't find on a map (like the Ukraine, or Palestine, despite your deep concern for them) and send shitty DMs to local small businesses but you keep getting interrupted by news alerts summarising what the IMF has to say about our unelected leaders' complete farce of a budget that might as well just be a wholesale transfer of the bank account contents of the lowest 10% of the country to the highest, so instead you hop on the Chinese spyware platform that every world government in the West has specifically tried to ban because of its ridiculous and blatant data-mining because "it's fun", which of course makes Meta very angry because they had the market cornered on stealing your very private information and desires but forgot to factor in that humans require "fun" in their headlong race into a nuclear winter where personalised advertising nanobots are intravenously injected into their cholesterol-clogged arteries.

Oh, to be Mr. Wednesday, just footloose and fancy-free, murdering mice for sport and then risking certain death to sprint across Victoria Road and into Nanika to scream in the face of The Chicken Man, demanding a portion of his meat bounty in exchange for ONE (1) small pet upon your furry head before darting out the door without so much as a "thanks" in search of adventure and erotic entanglements, free from the burdens of 'civilised' existence.

Unfortunately, I am not a cat, and must instead panne chicken and roast weird powders for the masses, then serve them, which does allow me to ignore the collapse of the species by occupying sixty to seventy hours of my week. Which is the next best thing, I suppose.



Come and get your lunch/dinner, Thursday-Sunday for two more weeks, down at the bun hatch. I made beets, and a bun that is basically a hamburger.

Hands down my favourite song about drinking piss.

The suns sets on the shack of steam.

Last day of the week for buns and bullshit.

Specials disappearing fast, so get your potato salads and cannoli while you can. We also have a boatload of red curry at the moment, so if you could order that it would really free up some fridge space.

How do you empathise with a collective narcissistic void?

Coming at you hot and fast this Thursday plus the weekend (except for the cannoli, which is fast but cold, or at least room temperature):

And, of course, the rest of the actual menu for those of you not interested in Special Things:

And remember, any trumpet you may have heard could have been Gabriel's, and what you are experiencing is Hell.*



* My guess, it was Jason Derulo's 2013 hit "song" Trumpets and most people were too busy changing the channel/station to contemplate the possible divine implications.

I want to eat hot fruit.

(bagpipe solo but everyone plays and kids scream)

"Meaning is doing! It's a language game! Words are content! Nonsense! Nonsense! Words are content! Yahoo!"

What do you do, I ask my lizard, who functions as a sort of sounding board for various ideas and musings, if a sounding board could also blink and eat bugs and take a shit (sometimes simultaneously), when you're in the grip of an obvious depression?

Naturally, I am not asking Brian what he would do, as he is incapable of feeling depression because he lives a life of abject luxury completely free from any responsibilities save body temperature regulation, which can be done simply by repositioning himself to various points inside his opulent reptile mansion. Outwith that small burden he is free to eat fresh salad or calcium-enriched locusts to his fat heart's content, taking day-long naps on his binkies or even with his hemipenal bulge plopped right smack dab in the middle of his salad bowl as whimsy would have it.

It is I, his manservant, who must exist in the outside world and use FirstBus, which is about as enjoyable an experience as passing a gallstone while being forced to watch Mrs. Brown's Boys.

I used to take taxis frequently, being willing to pay the premium to avoid supporting the most fucking useless excuse for public transportation I have ever seen in fourteen cities, six countries, and two continents, but ever since the pandemic and the consolidation of the remaining cab companies under GlasGo Cabs I have been left standing in parking lots for over an hour on so many occasions, watching the restaurant supplies I purchase spoil in the sun. Even the extremely expensive but usually dependable Black Cabs left me at the Rouken Glen Garden Center for two hours yesterday after accepting a booking without having any cars available then cancelling it without telling me, after three separate phone calls to the operator trying to figure out when I could expect to get home and eat, since I did not have breakfast nor lunch.

The fact that I have four days off per month causes me to be distressingly efficient with my time, so standing at bus stops or in parking lots for huge chunks of my day(s) is enough to make me literally weep (happened yesterday), but depending on how much I have purchased I can't carry it onto the bus, even if the bus were going to show up when the sign/screen says (a laughable joke; they run about 30% as often as they are scheduled to, and at whatever pace they feel like it) so I must rely on cabs, which means that any errands I have to run on my one day off per week usually take well over an hour and a half per errand, even if it's something as simple as getting groceries in Shawlands and taking them back to Eglington Toll. I could literally walk it faster if it were not for the burden of the purchased items. So quite often I am paying extortionate cab fares but not experiencing the speed and efficiency that using a cab should provide, or destroying my eternally-pained elbow dragging supplies and bags of rice to the bus stops just to sit there so long I have to hail a passing cab anyhow.

None of this is interesting to Brian nor you, I know, but the resulting misery that kind of curdles into a deeper lethargic depression where I don't get out of bed at all unless I absolutely have to is somewhat more relevant to our respective interactions. And I am not asking for a solution to the transit crisis because it is just a matter of de-privatising what should never have been made private in the first place, which is PUBLIC transit. And the cabs should obviously not be able to confirm bookings if no car has actually accepted the pickup because that is ... I don't know ... fucking stupid? Probably illegal? Remarkably similar to that thing that airlines started doing where they sell more tickets for a flight than the plane has seats like people aren't planning whole fucking holidays with accomodation, etc? A repugnant cash-grab that fucks over the end user, who is completely innocent of any wrongdoing and just trying to live? Yeah, that. It's like that.

And that is just trying to get groceries and some new soil for repotting a plant or two. We should probably avoid discussing running one business and watching another just sit there and deplete your life savings while you work seventy hours per week for nothing. That would not improve the horizontal nature of one's "spare" time at all.

No, what I am asking Brian is really just to look at me with his big, black, nub-rimmed eyes and sort of tilt his dumb, shovel-shaped head to one side in a gesture of ... camaraderie? Understanding? An if-you-die-I-also-die-so-don't die-and-also-my-pak-choi-is-kind-of-wilty sort of look that both soothes and comforts, and reminds me that the calathea which I have already (miraculously) saved from TWO spider mite infestations now has another, and requires my attention, so I should probably do that. Wouldn't want to have brought it back from the brink of death so often just to let it go now.

Which is, of course, the metaphor Brian was trying to convey. My life is enriched greatly by sharing a house with such a powerhouse of pure, mute intellect.





It should be noted that I do not technically "share a house" with Brian. He has his own house, which is inside my house, so while we are ostensibly flatmates it is not in the common interpretation where one of us might have to ask the other to scoot over on the couch or to turn the channel on the TV (neither of us actually own a TV, but you get the idea) because he does not wish to spend any time outside of his domicile and I don't fit inside it.

Put "me" in the equation; it's alright.

"When the seasons circle sideways out of turn, and words don't speak just fall across the carpet ..."

Is the purpose of the artist in 2022 to write grants? Is that the burning need for expression? The pressure to commune that demands release is neatly double-spaced obeisance to the money tap?

There is more genuine art in the decorative choices of an average immigrant's flat than the collective creational drive of the southside arts community because one is genuine and the other is so immured in bureaucracy that it cannot, regardless of eventual outcome, be considered true.



The voice of revolution cannot be funded through the engines of oppression, and what you create for Mammon will be critiqued by Maat.

Also, you can have a free mango cannoli if you buy £30 or more worth of food today.

You know, as a treat.

Is repetition not the foundation of memory? Can a habit form save for the repeated doing of a task?

Every employee gets the exact same speech(es). The Induction, if you will. At this point, I can do The Induction regardless of circumstance. I can do it in song. I can do it in French. I can do it while buckling swash on the foredeck of a canting ship. I can do it in French song while swashbuckling on the foredeck of a canting ship blindfolded. The Induction is ingrained from repetition, you see. It does not deviate. It does not alter. The induction is, in itself, an example of its own principles: that speed and technical proficiency come not from any inherent talent or desire on the part of the participant but almost solely and exclusively from consistent, purposeful repetition of tasks.

If you have to think you will fail.

If you have to look for it it is lost.

If you change the pattern the pattern does not exist.



It is neither elusive nor a secret. It isn't even difficult.

So why do so few manage to succeed?

What is it that prevents them from believing in the principles of The Induction despite the clear evidence of its merit?



Email your best guesses to nanika.glasgow@gmail.com and one of our representatives will engage you in esoteric debate regarding the declining moral and ethical state of Man in the 21st century. Act now, representatives are limited.