...of genetic stupidity and corned beef

I was standing in my best mate’s kitchen the other day while his wife was cooking corned beef and I was reminded about the tale of Brendon and the corned beef of slow and painful death...

I had recently separated from my partner of many years and had moved into an old friends place.

This was pretty much the epitome of 30 year old bachelor pads; grubby, untidy, unkempt, boozy, loud and furnished with mostly tired and decrepit second hand armchairs.

Oh yes and there was the dog, which for the most part had the run of the place and didn't hold much in the way of respect for cleanliness!

One of the blokes that spent a great deal of time with us during this time owned a small farmlet. From time to time he would manage a home kill which saw us all overloading the death out of our freezers in an effort to fit the better part of quarter a butchered cow in them.

So this being the first time Brendon had had to deal with this amount of meat he went about it all wrong and rather than apply any type of intelligence to the sorting and stacking of the different cuts he simply piled it all in a la one humongous lump.

It wasn't until nearly 24 hours later that I thought to ask him if he had remembered to turn it all so that it didn't just become one enormous frozen lump completely locked together and irremovable from the freezer.

Of course he had not.

So we set about trying to separate the bags of assorted cuts from each other. Fortunately the sheer amount of meat involved and the reasonably small size of the freezer meant that most of the meat had not completely frozen solid and with a bit of effort we managed to unlock the bags from each other and the freezer baskets and unload all of it out of the freezer into piles which we stacked on the nearest available armchairs. I then sorted the cuts out and we re-loaded the bags back into the freezer where they could safely continue the freezing process with out fear of becoming locked together.

What neither of us realized was that one of the several corned silversides we had stacked on one armchair had slipped down the back of the chair and being old and tatty had fallen straight down the back, come out the bottom and landed on the floor under the chair. This old chair was one of those rocker types that you would find old men smoking a pipe in at night and had a little type of skirt around the bottom of it that was supposed to hide all the ugly mechanisms that allowed it to rock and swivel. So although the packet of meat had fallen to the floor it was invisible under the skirt of the chair.

I don’t know how it is everywhere else in the world but in New Zealand raw corned meat often comes in vacuum packed bags that contain some of the brine the meat was originally corned in.

These bags are tough so as not to leak at any time and this was proven to be the case as the bag sat undiscovered beneath the chair until discovered by Brendons somewhat eccentric mother several months later when she happened to push the vacuum cleaner head under the chair (cleaning was never high on our list of priorities) and scooped it out.

Now the bag, being of the toughest type, hadn't ruptured (although I can only suppose it must have gone through a ballooning stage) so there had been no leaks on the floor or therefore smells and Brendons mother swears, despite her actually picking it up and carrying it to the kitchen sink, that it didn't smell at close proximity. It did however have a definite green tinge but the foolish old woman neglected to deem that as important and merely considered that this was something Brendon had taken out of the freezer for dinner, she also wrongly assumed that the ill mannered dog had swiped it off the bench and hidden it under the chair for treats later, when able to sneak it from the house.

So having made an ineffectual attempt at cleaning the un-cleanable mess that was Brendons house she buggered off leaving the festering lump of several months old meat to continue its steady decay in the sink.

When Brendon arrived home from work later that Friday afternoon he spied the dubious lump in the sink and dimwittedly assumed that his mom had taken it out of the freezer for him earlier that day. (Yes, yes I know, what was his mother doing in his house cleaning when he wasn't there etc, etc – that’s another story...) Anyways – I wasn't there at the time but I can only assume that during the aforementioned ‘ballooning’ of the bag the smell was contained and the lump had become so fetid that it had gone beyond smelling or that Brendon was just as big of a moron as his mother, because without further ado he put it in a pot with a couple of litres of water and began the process of cooking it.

Again, having not been there at the time I will have to assume that either the water or the boiling process re-energized the smell because when I did return later that evening with our mate John there was a distinct odor to the place. When I questioned the hapless Brendon as to the source he commented rather inconsequentially that it had been a lot worse during the first stage of boiling and had gotten a lot better with subsequent water changes! Hmmmmm.

The friend John who I had been out with also happened to be the supplier of the meat and we were both fairly puzzled as to its distinctly greenish tinge around the outer edge and the curious odor which I thought I might have come across once before whilst working in a morgue. But being young and hungry (and a bit pissed and stoned) and seeing how Brendon had already scoffed nearly half of the chunk, we decided there was nothing to be lost by trying a little bit...

I managed a slice but decided it wasn't anything like the corned silverside I had ever tried and the spicing of it was downright funky. John, who I suspect was acting on guilt managed several slices before giving it away as “a little strange” and declaring that Brendon had added something to it whilst it was cooking and for lack of better words, ‘made a right fuck of it’.

John and I trundled off to his farm a little later on and proceeded to get thoroughly drunk which had the net result of my not heading back to Brendons until much later the following day after making a partial recovery.

Both John and I had noticed a degree of gassiness the previous night but nothing that you wouldn't expect when ‘tipping in’ the amounts of beer we were accustomed to.

When we finally made it back to Brendons it was to find him asleep in the fetal position dressed only in his under shorts on the grimy floor of the toilet.

Strange.

...and a little disturbing.

So of course we left him where he was amongst the dirt scum and pubic hairs and set about having a few beers to settle our hangovers. At some point he must have roused himself and headed off to bed. He emerged many beers later to inform us of the terrible plight that had befallen him, punctuated by his being interrupted every few minutes by a need to rush to the toilet and dry retch in sphincter clenching bursts that made my eyes water.

Well of course John and I nearly laughed our cocks off and spent quite awhile slapping each other on the back and coming to grips with that strange gassiness we had experienced the night before. We then spent several more minutes laughing at poor Brendon until finally he took the easier option and went back to alternating between his bed and the toilet.

We were tempted to clean up some of the vomit around the place but I had a sneaking suspicion that the dog was up to the job anyway because she had promptly developed a nasty dose of the shits and there were definately wet patches around the place that looked like they might have been vomit piles at one stage but now had the distinct appearance they had been cleaned up with a wire brush...

John and I decided to head out again later that evening and just as we were about to leave we heard a weak and frankly, rather pathetic wailing coming from Brendons bedroom.

“John... John”

so we stop and John hollers out a hearty “yeah mate?”

...”could you get me... a glass of water?”

Yeah, yeah I know it’s not all that funny but were all reasonably hard blokes back then so it was pretty amusing to us at the time and it took us both a few seconds to compose ourselves so as to not appear too callous, before John shot through to the kitchen to get the poor bugger a glass of water.

In all fairness as we were getting to the top of the street we did stop and ask each other if we thought he was going to be o.k. – only for a second mind before the lure of beer had us on our way.

We got back to Brendons late Sunday night to find his condition was quite a lot worse!

Luckily his mom had got wind of his illness and decided to come and check on him. One glance at his woeful condition and she whisked him off to the A and E at Auckland hospital where he was diagnosed with a severe bacterial and viral digestion tract infection!

They had kept him over the Saturday night and had released him Sunday after having pumped him full of anti-bacterial drugs and loaded him up with so many pills if you would have shaken him, he would have rattled.

It took him nearly two weeks to come right but to be honest after this episode I could never look at either Brendon or his mother and think they could actually ever be right.

Currently listening to:

del Amitri – Waking Hours

Ben Harper – White Lies for Dark Times

...of Range Rovers and work vans

I thought it was time that I took a break from being the object of ridicule for awhile.

Yes I did receive a couple of emails saying ‘ohhh do tell the story of the heated handle bar grips’ but that was some fourteen years ago and it will take a little time for me to recall the details exactly.

In the meantime I thought to recount the unfortunate tale that befell a friend of mine who shall, in the interest of discretion remain nameless.

O.k – So let me set the scene, because that for me is the true essence of this particular fail/tale.

My friend; lets call him, “friend X” just to make things easy, had lived all of his life, along with myself and most of our other mutual friends in the area commonly referred to as West Auckland.

Auckland is divided along the four points of the compass and by being extremely and rudely stereotypical can be surmised thus: North Auckland is home to the more professional people of Auckland with large expensive homes, harbor views and rates to match. East Auckland has a wealthy Asian population also sporting expansive new homes and rates to suit. South Auckland houses the lower socioeconomic groups, mostly Maori and Polynesian and is sometimes, perhaps unfairly, described as the violent crime quarter of Auckland. West Auckland is seen, to a greater degree by the other quarters as the fast car, loud party, hard drinking, drug centre of Auckland. (I did say it was going to be stereotypical and rude!)

As with any area in which you spend most of your life it becomes, ‘home’ with most of the downsides minimized so that you become reasonably attached, in a territorial kind of way regardless.

Not so for friend X.

He had decided that he was tired of the loutishness and ‘hoonism’ that in my opinion adds a degree of charm and interest to the area. And so he decided to make the move upwards to the north of Auckland and so be free of cars doing burnouts in the middle of his street in the dead of the night or waking up to find somebody had lost control of their vehicle in the early hours and taken out the better part of the front fence and accompanying shrubberies.

Fair enough I suppose. But somewhere in the back of my mind a little voice kept saying “good one, I wonder how your new neighbors are going to feel about you moving in and completely lowering the tone”.

Anyway; a week after moving in and friend X is quick to extol upon us the virtues of living in his more up market place of residence. “No more loud cars, reckless drivers, roaming dogs etc, etc blah, blah, blah" - whatever!

Now friend X was the owner of several vehicles one of which was a rather grumpy looking Range Rover powered by a 400cu Chevy big block which had been ‘uglied’ up by having a Series 2 Land Rover body perched upon it and a roll cage thrown in for good measure. He was also a tradesman and had a long wheelbase van for use in the day to day running of his business.

One evening in that first week of moving in, he returned home from work in the dim light of early dusk and still being a little inexperienced with the steep driveway of the new house, misjudged the width of the driveway and ended up with two wheels off the edge.

Given the speed of the descending darkness he made the decision to leave the van where it was until the morning when he could, with some assistance from his housemates haul the vehicle back onto the driveway proper.

He awoke reasonably late in the morning to find that while he had slept his housemates who needed to be at work much earlier that same morning - had left. Not wishing to face his ferocious waking temper (or breath) they had chosen to let him sleep on. The grounds for this decision being fairly based upon the premise that he knew they had to leave early and if he required assistance he would ensure he was ready when they were.

By keeping to the very far left of the driveway they had squeezed past his trapped vehicle and merrily headed off to their respective workplaces.

Now, being a reasonably practical sort of chap, friend x took it upon himself to recover from this predicament unassisted.

He went about it thus: He backed the Rangie down the driveway from the house and parked it within towing rope distance from the front of the work van. He then attached a stout 4WD recovery strap to the back of the Rangie and the front of the van.

I know what your thinking – how does one person tow two vehicles? Put that to one side for a moment because that is really only half of the picture – we’ll come back to that.

Let me attempt to paint you a picture of this driveway.

Not only is it very steep but at the bottom of it and running perfectly perpendicular to it was a fairly busy road. This road merely divided the steep hill that friend x’s house was situated on the top half of. Directly across this road was another driveway which was equally steep but of course was headed down the hill. At the bottom of that driveway was what you would call “the neighbor across the roads” house. Hopefully you get the picture – steep hill, road running across it, some houses up from the road, some houses down from the road.

Now where was I... Ah yes – so how does one person tow two vehicles? Or more appropriately, why would one person want to tow two vehicles on their own given the circumstance!

Well lets face it we’re men and we may all be brave under pressure but you would be foolish to say we were the smartest of the sexes... Enough said.

So friend x piles himself into the four wheel drive from hell and figures that just a gentle yank ought to do it as he has no intention of attempting to pull the van anyfurther than simply back on to the concrete.

Well this proves to be a little tougher than at first expected due to the rut the vans spinning tires have created multiplied by the thickness of the driveway concrete.

Thus begins the real tale of woe.

Having unsuccessfully given the van several light tugs (if such a thing is really possible with 400cubes and a low range gearbox suited for climbing vertical glaciers) friend x not known for his tireless patience makes the foolhardy decision to bury the go pedal.

Yay! - The van pops magically out of its ruts, one more small yank and she will be on the driveway completely.

Funny isn’t it, how disaster always strikes when success is so close you can taste it.

With a sickening lurch the Rangie leapt forward just as friend x had suspected it would when the van finally rolled up on to the driveway – but no.

The van had in actuality made it up on to the driveway but at almost the precise same moment the towing rope came undone at the van end!

Unlike most stories where in situations like this, time seems to slow and everything else slows with it, this was not so for the van and its phantom driver.

Being that it was rolling backwards down a very steep driveway and the steering wheels were at the back it simply followed the contours of the driveway picking up speed at an altogether alarming rate.

By the time friend x had clambered from the Rangie and begun to run frantically after the fast retreating van it had accelerated to a frightening 50 – 60km/h. Not daunted by the fast approaching end of the driveway the van appeared to gather even greater speed before launching itself out of the driveway and tearing blindly across the road where as fate would have it, the neighbor’s driveway lay in wait with welcoming arms.

A horrified friend x had sprinted to the bottom of his driveway and across the street in time to see the accursed van gather ever more speed on the neighbors driveway only an instant before burying itself with a horrendous smashing of glass, crashing and tearing noise, half of it’s own length deep into the neighbors house.

As he stood there wringing his hands in woe and wondering which emergency service to call first two things happened.

One was the recalling of a vague memory to do with the parking brake in the Rangie, the second was a strange rattling noise coming from his driveway.

And so, just when friend x thought things could hardly get worse, they did.

Hello! – here comes the fucking Rangie.

In his haste to abandon the 4WD upon seeing the van making an escape from the towing rope friend x had failed to adequately engage the parking brake and now the 4WD too was hurtling down the driveway apparently intent on rejoining its escaped companion.

In a frustratingly inconvenient display of arrogance time now choose this exact moment to slow down. And with agonizing clarity and a painful feeling of impending doom friend x watch the behemoth of a 4WD sail across the road, down the neighbors driveway to plant itself with a sickening crunch two feet deep into the only remaining undamaged panels and windows in the front of the luckless van. This also had the undesirable effect of pushing the van the rest of the way into the bedroom on suite that had taken the brunt of its impact, ripping the bathroom vanity from the wall, rupturing the associated hot and cold water pipes from the taps to send showers of water over the whole rotten mess.

I suppose if there can be an upside it would have to be that through the whole debacle nobody was injured in the least, so long as injured pride is not taken into the equation.

But what will forever remain ingrained in my memory are my friend’s initial reasons to move out of west Auckland...

Currently listening to:

Pitbull – The Boatlift

SuperGroove - Postage