Saturday 20 October 2012

Dad's gone to home

A vacation, a visit back home and a culinary challenge. We are guests, that our hosts feel are somewhat anorexic, despite ridiculous level of visual evidence that 20:20 eyesight or even 1:1 eyesight should see. We are to be fed.

We are challenged to eat sausage rolls.We eat peas mushed to saliva-dribbling-good. We eat beans that are praised for their protein content and condemned for post-intestinal aeration qualities. We eat pickled onions as if bad breath can be solved by a mint polo, ho-hum. We eat chips saturated in fat by the chip shop owner and drowned in salt and vinegar by chip eater.We are back eating "Full English", that it needs to further words like breakfast.

Weight watching we can do, watching it go up and trouser-belt ratios goes up a notch.

Family and friends expect feasting and we are too polite to say no and too happy to say yes.

This is all a good thing, to count calories in large amounts and to tell jokes that are based on a mutual shared past. An ambiente has been created based on a cholesterol fest. Tales to tell, to exaggerate, to Billy-Bragg-it this is my UK. Good times to be had by all. The gym can wait. There are new shared mutual history to be made for next year's stories.

But, and double but, there are consequences when day becomes night, I am again called to share a bed with a lanky stick insect called my son.
I  am guessing the bed that I see before me is a probable sign of a long forgotten sibling rivalry that maybe associated with a my lack of sharing a Lego toy in '77. My brother introduces us, yes us, to a three quarter bed. Three quarters is not one double bed and we are two fully grown adults in size, if not in age. One fully grown adult in particular is known to be "XXL", my brother knows this, since my brother bought me a Christmas pullover that was "XXL" and I like to think I am "XL" going on" L". He was big on Lego in the seventies.

So I face a night of torment as he, my son, takes revenge for a childhood imagined injustices, he sets about to toss, to turn, to kick twelve bags of.... but at least we are talking bags and not sacks, if you know what I mean. Its not his fault, he was sleeping, he will say, I know he is avenging my mildly sarcastic tone about  him being lanky and sticky.

But I am impervious to his kicks I have fat, thanks to my hosts, as my body knows more than me I am XL going on XXL.

It's time to bring out the big guns, I will avenge, let the snoring begin. He will awake.  I will survive until breakfast is cooked in an English way. Ready defibrillators.