Who would have thought after my criticism of Ian Thorpe’s overly-analytical commentary during Australia’s races at the recent Olympic, that I’d be turning on my heel and labelling him a man after my own heart.
I might be fickle, but I am fair and forgiving. As much as Wanda wouldn’t take too kindly to me exiting the front door in pursuit of bromance, I’d be lying to say I haven’t suggested that Thorpey would be a good choice.
Then again, maybe Wanda’s dreaming of the day. We’ve been a little on edge lately because we have slightly differing views on Covid vaccines.
I’m more in the “make everyone get it, open the borders and get on with life” camp of thinking. Wanda’s taken an empathetic “let people make up their own minds because who knows – we might all be walking time bombs” take on things.
It’s a topic that, for now at least, we keep off the table although I do profess to a moment of genius the other day when placing “covidjab” as a clever subliminal message on the Scrabble board, doubling as a triple-word score and which would have won me the game had it not been for a pre-pandemic version of our “official” dictionary.
Never mind. It might not be great to bottle things up, but the Covid genie’s been put back in its demijohn for the immediate future, all in the name of household peace and serenity.
It’s a slapdash segue, but when the heat’s on, Wanda and I both have escape routes – doors we open when we’re starting to get on each other’s nerves. To be fair to my dear wife, she probably requires the bunker a little more frequently than yours annoyingly.
Regardless, her happy place is the games room where she’ll channel her thoughts into the feng shui shapes of a jigsaw, or if she’s feeling particularly aggressive she’ll recalibrate by reaching for a ginger beer and drawing on her misspent youth by grouping in a few 180s on the dart board.
I’ve seen how precise she can be, landing one dart within millimetres of the next. She doesn’t play club competition any more, I fear preferring to visualise one of my eyes in the triple-20 cavity.
My place to re-set is the kitchen. Which takes us back to Thorpey whose determined, if not excessively competitive, efforts on Masterchef are remarkably like my own.
Okay, only one dish was remarkably like my own – a scallop dish that the judges agreed was an explosion of flavours, yet left art critics scratching their heads that someone who could break world records in the pool could be so far removed from the right side of the brain.
Which got me thinking. Also a little nervous.
I’ve relied on my creative energy to pay the mortgage over the years, and here I am still fumbling away at a typewriter of sorts, trying to entertain you with a rambling of semi-coherency about things that have occurred to me over the past week.
Yet, when trying to plate a palate-warming piquancy, I crumble violet-style as I search any semblance of artistic flair from an art lesson somewhere around 1967 in which the teacher required anything more than a stick figure to generate a pass on my report card.
That’s right, nobody failed art. But here I am with my food Monet served as little more than a smiley face, just as I was as a child trying to justify 13 hours of gluing crepe paper to a balloon.
If it’s true that people really do eat with their eyes, I’ve failed many a guest at dinner parties in our humble abode.
For that, I’m sorry. But I’m not sorry that I’ve dabbled in all sorts of delicacies and delights, because food is another time-tested peace mechanism.
Hey, Wanda! When you’ve finished punching holes in the wall, can I light your fire with the lemon flambe I’ve just whipped up on the stove?
