Dear Harry,
It’s been a couple of weeks plus since I last dropped you a line and since I’ve got Christmas Eve off work and I’m just finished pinning fairy lights down the garden fence, I though what better time to catch up.
So after one Australian Christmas with my Godmother Daphne in Melbourne and one will Alex in Sydney, now it’s our turn to play host. This will be our first married Christmas and the first time we have had a chance to use our new BBQ in anger, grill for the Chrimbo masses.
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been experiencing an increasing number of Hyper-Australian events, these started with the buying of the BBQ, seen as an Australian right of passage and culminating in the moment that Alex and I bumping into our mates Sharon and Don at Bondi Junction. The pair of us staggered out of the bottle shop, armed with a slab of beer apiece (a slab is a 24 back of beer, usually 4x 6bottles) while Don and Sharon were perusing the butchery goodness in the window at Bush Meats. G’Day’s were exchanged and we went our separate ways.
So what does our Christmas day hold in store, I hear you ask. Well I don’t really but it’s better if I just press on. In a nutshell the - Christmas Trinity – food, booze and presents. I’ve tried to be good this year and not get in quantities of comestibles that would attract as admiring nod from the quartermaster of an invading army, but old habits die hard. Plan for all eventualities – there must be enough to go round so that if for some reason you get an extra 30 people you are fully covered. It’s nonsense of course, in the end you either end up stuffing all your guests to the point where the taxi home comes with blue flashing lights or the quantity of wastage attracts the ire of Bono and his like.
Then you have the question of where do you put all your guests? Despite the simple failing of our current home, the space at the rear of the building, that with some landscaping could be called a garden but at the moment looks like a bomb site decorated by a one-eyed man with a brick fetish, will do a not bad job at housing the troops.
The biggest problem is that nothing is on the level. The brick floor is on a slope from the laneway beyond the gate to the back door with the bricks themselves undulating in such a higgledy-piggledy fashion as to look as if someone has made a shabby attempt to try and conceal the body of a shire horse by throwing rubble on top and jumping up and down a bit.
Erm …
Sorry minor break in my though pattern there. Hendricks was / is / always demanding attention. All sorts of feline song and dance. As a special Christmas treat we got the cats some chicken yesterday. While generally getting on with a host of things today I boiled this chook up and it seems that the smell of cooking meat in our kitchen, a rarity in this house, has distinctly loosened the spring in Hendricks’s already overwound mind. At one point earlier I ended up having to cut the chicken into chunks with his head trapped under the crook of my arm after he leapt full bodied onto the kitchen counter, despite the fact I was standing in his path.
To make matters worse Hendricks managed to loose his collar last week and his temporary replacement came fitted with a bell. This means that his approaching insanity is now accompanied with the perpetual jingling of said, little bell. I imagine that the cats stealth aspect has been somewhat reduced by the fact that he sounds like a Lapland Reindeer, but at least it warns me of impending lunacy.
Anyway I must dash. In the great tradition of religious holidays I’ve got to see if I can get a haircut. Somehow I seem to always leave it until the day before a significant moment in the life of Jesus to realise that I look like the underside of a Yack’s sac and need to get shewn immediately.
Loads of love,
Charlie