Let me set the scene for you.
Christmas eve at my Godparent’s house. We go there every year. Kinda because we have to I suppose. It’s not that I don’t love my Godparents, I do. I really do. It’s just that…. Well you know when you’re 12 and you realize you don’t particularly have anything in common with most of your parent’s friend’s children? And it’s not because they’re not great people, they’re just completely different to you? Ok so imagine that at 35. when you did, in fact, realize it at 12. Anyway……. So we were sitting around, freezing our asses off (Christmas in australia’s hot my fat ass) eating incincerated barbeque meat and any salad you can find in the 1976 copy of the Woman’s Weekly Cookbook, like ‘cut glass’ which for all intents and purposes appears to me to be carrot in jelly or something equally as revolting or cucumber, tomato and onion in brown vinegar. Those wacky woman’s weekly cooks….so damn creative. I presume there is a 2007 version available, but you can bet your ass it has no mention of a crock pot, thus rendering it completely useless in my mother’s eyes.
(which is so not fair, because she is an excellent cook and I have the hips to prove it. BUT it would seem I’m still good with the digressssssssssssing, despite my extended blogcation (blog+vacation. I KNOW. So freaking clever.)
Poor maxi comes along with me to these things because it’s Christmas and you know, it’s all about family and stuff and because I stop putting out if he doesn’t but you know if I have nothing in common with these people I actually love and care about then he has less than nothing. Makes for an exciting evening I can tell you. Needless to say he and my sister find endless things to do to amuse themselves. Like having to pop home to get jumpers, or down the street because someone is out of their drink of preference. All while I speak in a loud an offensive voice hoping that it will stop the deafening silences between my mum asking my children to do their special tricks ( “angus, tell lorraine what the largest living land mammal is?” and “tess, come give granny a cuddle and tell Beverly all about what you did in the school concert this year”). this year they outdid themselves. Oh yes. This year they made a bet.
Before I can go further I need to tell you that my sister lives alone. She isn’t in a relationship with a man at the moment, nor a woman as far as I can tell, and it’s been long enough between drinks to forget, I suppose, what it is like to share your daily space with another human being. She doesn’t do picking up someone else’s dirty socks, nor does she have to put the seat down lest she get a wet butt. She goes out and when she comes back her house looks exactly as it did when she left. Nothing out of place, no sudden eruption of washing because the bag from fishing was just put into the laundry. No malingering odours from as yet undiscovered food in the playroom. You know. Predictable. However, and you can trust me on this… I plan on making her life a whole lot less predictable at some point in the future. I am willing to bide my time, but she is so getting some back. You think I’m a little vengeful? You’re right I am, but she knew poor maxi doesn’t dig the Christmas eve bbq, she got him in a moment of weakness. You see, half way through his meal of what was once a bbq chop and brown vinegar soaked cucumber and from page 172 of 1976’s woman’s weekly cookbook, the four bean salad she got him. Evil cow.
Maxi who is a typical meat and three veg bloke and is totally feeling the 1976 cooking love muttered the fateful words….
“I love four bean salad. I could live off it”
now I wasn’t witness to it, but between guffaws my sister related what happened next faithfully….
S; “you could live off it?”
M; “ oh yeah. I could live off it.”
S; “how long do you reckon you would last?”
M; “ever.”
S; “two weeks?”
M; “shit yes.”
S: “ bet you a hundred dollars you couldn’t”
M; “you’re on”
My sister is single but she still knows blokes and she knew he wouldn’t be able to resist betting on something like that. Because he is a man. A man with a giant fish on his shed wall. Who scratches himself inappropriately at times. In inappropriate places. A man who calls waiters garcon. Not gar-son. Gar-kon. He does this because, he is totally down with the French lingo and stuff. Obviously.
So thus my nightmare began. They discussed terms and somewhere between Christmas and new year my sister turned up with about ten tins of four bean mix, a tin of red beans and a tin of refried beans. She had acquiesced on the latter. Big of her, don’t you think?
Just so you know. He made it until day ten. He made until the air in my house was so think with his stench the children and I moved down to the shed. He made it until even his stomach sounded like a water cooler bubbling up. He made it until day ten of a fourteen day stretch with nothing in his mouth other than beans and then he folded. And of course a bet is a bet, so I lived with the hell that was my husband and my bloody sister got to keep her $100.00.
The cow is going to pay. Someway, sometime, she will pay.
