around slowly while people take photographs. Every TV show I’ve ever watched about them has taught me that. And you know what else? They’re always bloody quiet . Silent little balls of fluff that wouldn’t say boo to an entire flock of fucking geese. Not the koala bears in my current neck of the woods, though. These bastards would give a pack of hooting gibbons a run for their money in the decibel championships.
Snorg! Snorg! Snorg!
I’m going to kill myself. But first I will kill Laura. It’s been a fairly decent marriage up to now, but I’m afraid it must end with homicide. There’s nothing else for it. Poppy can be adopted by Grant and Ellie, if she isn’t eaten by snakes in the interim.
Speaking of snakes, when there’s a brief surcease from the koalas shagging one another outside, I can hear the occasional bump and creak coming from above my head.
With sleep impossible, I’ve brought the laptop out onto the veranda to chronicle this most bizarre of days. Grant and Ellie are indeed very nice people, but they’re also hippies. What’s more, they are hippies living in a world they are ill-equipped to deal with. It’s all very well preaching love and tolerance from a quiet rural Queensland suburb, but you try applying those philosophies to an average Monday morning on the M25 motorway and see how far it gets you.
Laura and I are very much products of our own environment and therefore have little in common with our new hippy friends. Dinner was a prime example of this disconnect. I’m sure in their world a limp green salad, a couple of grey tofu burgers, and a round of goat’s milk is a hearty meal. Grant looked positively stuffed after eating a single spinach leaf. I, on the other hand, hoovered up the meagre fare in thirty seconds and immediately started wondering what roasted koala tastes like.
After dinner I was looking forward to an early night. Poppy had already buggered off to bed, and I was feeling intensely jealous of her good fortune. Grant and Ellie had other plans for Laura and me, sadly.
“So, then!” Grant says from under a goat’s milk moustache. “Who’s up for a game of Rummikub?”
“What?” I reply around my last morsel of tofu.
“Rummikub! Me and Ellie love a game, and whenever we have guests we always insist they play!”
This day has now descended into levels of surrealism Salvador Dali would have been baffled by.
“Rummikub? What’s that?” Laura asks.
“You’ve never played Rummikub?” Ellie’s tone suggests that Laura has missed out on one of the greatest pleasures in the known universe.
“I have,” I offer up in a bland voice.
Rummikub is awful. A confusing mishmash of gin rummy and dominoes, it’s harder to pick up than molten lead, goes on for hours, and demands a level of mathematical ability most of us lose five seconds after we leave our final school exam.
“Fantastic!” Ellie shrieks and magically produces the oldest-looking Rummikub box I’ve ever seen. With combined looks of obsessive glee, Grant and Ellie start to hand out the game tiles and the wooden racks you put them in. They then proceed to fill Laura in on the rules of the game.
My wife is a very intelligent woman, who can grasp complicated theories and equations with relative ease. Therefore, it only takes what feels like eight weeks for her to grasp the infernal rules of Rummikub. This is excellent. It takes most people the better part of a year. And thus the game begins.
Two point eight nanoseconds later, I want to choke myself to death with my own fist.
We spend the next ninety-three years of our lives playing the first game, which Ellie wins by a country mile.
“Never mind!” Grant tells Laura and me. “You’ll pick it up better in the next game.”
And indeed, seven centuries later I’m surprised to find myself beating Grant. Ellie is still way ahead, but at least I’ve got one up on the bony head of the house.
Another forty-six millennia go by (including two ice
Snorg! Snorg! Snorg!
I’m going to kill myself. But first I will kill Laura. It’s been a fairly decent marriage up to now, but I’m afraid it must end with homicide. There’s nothing else for it. Poppy can be adopted by Grant and Ellie, if she isn’t eaten by snakes in the interim.
Speaking of snakes, when there’s a brief surcease from the koalas shagging one another outside, I can hear the occasional bump and creak coming from above my head.
With sleep impossible, I’ve brought the laptop out onto the veranda to chronicle this most bizarre of days. Grant and Ellie are indeed very nice people, but they’re also hippies. What’s more, they are hippies living in a world they are ill-equipped to deal with. It’s all very well preaching love and tolerance from a quiet rural Queensland suburb, but you try applying those philosophies to an average Monday morning on the M25 motorway and see how far it gets you.
Laura and I are very much products of our own environment and therefore have little in common with our new hippy friends. Dinner was a prime example of this disconnect. I’m sure in their world a limp green salad, a couple of grey tofu burgers, and a round of goat’s milk is a hearty meal. Grant looked positively stuffed after eating a single spinach leaf. I, on the other hand, hoovered up the meagre fare in thirty seconds and immediately started wondering what roasted koala tastes like.
After dinner I was looking forward to an early night. Poppy had already buggered off to bed, and I was feeling intensely jealous of her good fortune. Grant and Ellie had other plans for Laura and me, sadly.
“So, then!” Grant says from under a goat’s milk moustache. “Who’s up for a game of Rummikub?”
“What?” I reply around my last morsel of tofu.
“Rummikub! Me and Ellie love a game, and whenever we have guests we always insist they play!”
This day has now descended into levels of surrealism Salvador Dali would have been baffled by.
“Rummikub? What’s that?” Laura asks.
“You’ve never played Rummikub?” Ellie’s tone suggests that Laura has missed out on one of the greatest pleasures in the known universe.
“I have,” I offer up in a bland voice.
Rummikub is awful. A confusing mishmash of gin rummy and dominoes, it’s harder to pick up than molten lead, goes on for hours, and demands a level of mathematical ability most of us lose five seconds after we leave our final school exam.
“Fantastic!” Ellie shrieks and magically produces the oldest-looking Rummikub box I’ve ever seen. With combined looks of obsessive glee, Grant and Ellie start to hand out the game tiles and the wooden racks you put them in. They then proceed to fill Laura in on the rules of the game.
My wife is a very intelligent woman, who can grasp complicated theories and equations with relative ease. Therefore, it only takes what feels like eight weeks for her to grasp the infernal rules of Rummikub. This is excellent. It takes most people the better part of a year. And thus the game begins.
Two point eight nanoseconds later, I want to choke myself to death with my own fist.
We spend the next ninety-three years of our lives playing the first game, which Ellie wins by a country mile.
“Never mind!” Grant tells Laura and me. “You’ll pick it up better in the next game.”
And indeed, seven centuries later I’m surprised to find myself beating Grant. Ellie is still way ahead, but at least I’ve got one up on the bony head of the house.
Another forty-six millennia go by (including two ice
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