...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