Category: Reminiscences

As I have mentioned previously, I once shared a dormitory with thirty-one fellow males. During this time, I distinctly remember being in its communal bathroom, as I washed my hands, when the door of the cubicle behind me suddenly opened and its hitherto occupant proceeded to head for the exit.

“Aren’t you going to wash your hands?” I inquired.

“I only wash my hands when my fingers go through the toilet paper!” Came his reply as he proceeded on his way.

I was seated at a table with our dog as I awaited Tiki’s return from a nearby supermarket. As it was officially spring, when a woman walked by and noticed that I was wearing a scarf, she remarked, “My word, it’s cold!”.

“It must be global cooling!”, I replied. “Someone must have turned off the boiler!”.

A few months after I first met Tiki, I moved to board with an elderly couple in their unit that overlooked the beach at Collaroy on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. My overweight landlady had battled ill health to such an extent that she was to inform me that she had been pronounced legally dead “five times”.

She must have possessed a problem with her salivary glands, as she always had a handkerchief, literally in hand, with which to repeatedly wipe her mouth. However, despite the ever present battle with her health, she never lost her sense of humour.

I remember her once proclaiming to me, when making reference to the fools and dolts in society, “There’s one born every minute and one dies every ten years!”

“There’s nothing wrong with me that a sharp axe won’t fix!”, was another of her expressions.

Tiki has just reminded me of another of my former landlady’s sayings, “I have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana skin!”

We were watching an edition of the British series, ‘Escape To The Country’, filmed in May of 2018, in the English county of Suffolk. Perhaps, it was when the elderly couple was viewing the second of the three properties for sale, that the host turned to the gentleman and enquired of him as to just how long it had been since he last cooked for his wife.

It, therefore, came as no surprise to me when Tiki turned and demanded, “When was the last time you cooked for me?”.

“Some years ago, when it was forty-one degrees and you wouldn’t allow me to turn on the air conditioner!”, I quipped.

Tiki volunteered that she would dry my hair as she invariably does, especially when it is cold or inclement; prior to her then combing it to her satisfaction.

She invited me to sit at her end of the lounge as it was closer to the power-point and as I proceeded to make myself as comfortable as possible she passed comment on the effort I was making in order to do so.

“I’m just attempting to emulate you,” I replied.

“If you were trying to emulate me”, she retorted, “you’d be doing the cooking, the gardening…!”

“Well, I have made a few modifications!”, I quipped, baring a cheeky grin.

We were watching a news bulletin when there was word of a study that claimed to show that mothers play a greater role in the naming of a baby.

This led Tiki to inquire of me if I was, indeed, aware of whether it had been my mother who had done so.

“I can’t recall. I was a bit young at the time. But I was told that ‘Ian’ was Scottish for ‘John’.”

“Perhaps your mother thought you looked a bit like an American toilet!” She retorted.

We came upon an elderly couple as they were also on their daily walk. The gentleman was wheeling their black poodle as it sat in a pram, the only problem being that he had forgotten to disengage the pram’s brake.

As he did so, I could not help but mention of how, in the previous week, I had failed in my attempt to start our lawnmower and of how it wasn’t until I had gone upstairs to report this fact to Tiki, that she inquired of me if I had, in fact, engaged its choke.

“I was very nearly choked, there and then!”, I joked.

Tiki had espied a pair of mugs in the front window of a shop, we were passing. The mug on the left possessed the wording ‘Mr Right’ while the second displayed that of ‘Mrs Always Right’.

As Tiki was consumed with laughter, my mind wondered why “my” mug was absent from the display, for it would have conveyed the perceived self-belief, ‘Mr Seldom Right!’.

Our dog was doing her very best to defecate on an upturned dinghy.

“I do believe she’s attempting to christen it!”, I announced at the time.

“What name did she bestow on it?”, Tiki enquired.

“Poop Deck”, I quipped.

Tiki had just commented on how pieces of clothing appeared to scattered about the furniture in our lounge room.

“I have my whole wardrobe out to impress you. I’m like a dancing peacock!”, I professed.

“You can forget about the cock bit!”, she retorted through a smile.