Getting to the bottom

..and
make the final report up. “Totally clear apart and medically sound apart
from some wreckage from the Lusitania”
Given that, prior to this procedure I have been taking peculiar and powerful
drinks whose only role in life is to turn the one and a half metres of my colon
into a pristine wasteland by ensuring the egress of the existing contents at
a high speed in a southerly and liquid direction, they are welcome. The afore-mentioned
industrial strength laxatives would evacuate Port Philip Bay, leaving it both
dry enough and so devoid of aquatic flora and fauna that you could walk across
from Mornington to Geelong without as much as seeing a shrimp.
I imagine that opportunity for Monty Python mirth is quite high, provided you
positioned yourself carefully in the operating theatre. I am hoping that they
don’t film it and put in on YouTube, complete with ribald remarks. Perhaps
U-bend may be more appropriate.
However, it probably isn’t a job that most of us would like, so they can
enjoy their moments of mirth. Seen one sphincter, perhaps you have seen them
all? Mine at the moment would like to be small and retiring – and somewhere
else.
But, the matter of what to eat afterwards is an issue. Should I be sensible
and gradually ease my way back into the world of solid food with chicken broth
and crackers? Or should I go for the mega pizza with the lot and half a bottle
of red?
Or, will I be full of wind (but no pith) – a by-product of the procedure
– and still be ricocheting around the room like a released balloon for the next
twenty-four hours?
On the other hand I could savour the moment with an exotic recipe from one of
the more than sixty cookbooks that are around the house, the vast majority purchased
by my wife, who is fortunately a good cook. Where I would buy another literary
masterpiece ‘The Charterhouse of Parmesan’ or ‘The Old Man
and the Sea Food”, she would buy another Jamie Oliver, such as ‘Pucka
Tucka’, or ‘Jamie annoys the Patagonians’.
To be fair some of the books have been opened, but of the estimated six thousand
recipes they contain I imagine that we have had fifty served as a meal in the
past twenty years.
I started life with one cookbook from my late grandmother, the ‘Edmonds
Sure to Rise Cookbook’, that explained how to boil water, cook eggs, fry
chops and make scones and invalid custard. This sensibly was all a young New
Zealander could ever need to know as far as food went.
My maternal grandmother was a basic cook and was always old. Perhaps the cookbook
was to blame. Logically she can only be have been in her early fifties when
she coalesced into my memories, but she seems to have been always of generous
country lady dimensions with the magnificent maternal bosom few actresses, apart
from Margaret Rutherford, would own to.
The Edmonds three-storeyed factory and gardens were on Ferry Road, Christchurch,
and we used to approach the building with its optimistic ‘Sure to Rise’
sign as we drove to get to the beach at Sumner. The building was demolished
in 1990, apparently amidst controversy, as I suspect the sign had the cultural
resonance that the ‘Skipping Girl’ sign does to Melbournians.
The Cookbook served me through my student days and is still with me – the pages
now distinctly stained with tomato sauce and butter and the binding’s holding
by a thread.
Recipe books are a double edged sword – they preserve a moment of a culture
and internationalise it. Ways of eating tied to place and culture are preserved,
but they are also displaced and taken away from what made them live. To an extent
we are in danger of turning food into an equivalent of the internationally indistinguishable
shopping mall, where we don’t know which country we are in judging by
either what we see or what we eat.
So what to do? Shall I like the true gourmand arise from my theatre couch to
slowly torture myself with an elaborate ritual of preparation? The careful selection
of organic produce, the slow reduction of the stock, the gentle glazing of the
meat in extra-virgin olive oil, the preparation of the sauces and the careful
cooking of the vegetables so that they are al dente.
Or fast food to fill what at the moment is a gastronomic wasteland?

And what actually happened? Well, I was feeling rather sorry for myself,
the wind was still howling in the willows, so I had a bowl of soup and a bit
of toast and went to bed, periodically ruffling the sheets with soft susurrations.