Santa’s Blog 6

Friday, December 11, 2009, 10:27

She caught me practicing in front of the mirror. I am going to be the star turn at… (Ah! that would be an unpaid advertisement…). But the Missus says that my career as a stand-up comic is over before it’s begun.
I don’t agree. These’ll sleigh them for sure and all:
What do reindeer have that no other animals have? Baby reindeer. What do the reindeer sing to Father Christmas? Freeze a jolly good fellow. What does Santa get at Christmas? Santapplause. Who delivers presents to baby sharks at Christmas? Santa Jaws! Why does Father Christmas have three gardens? So he can ho ho ho. How do you make a slow reindeer fast? Don’t feed it. What do they call Santa Claus in Australia? Sandy Claus. Why did Rudolph wear sunglasses at the beach? He didn’t want to be recognised. Why do reindeer have fur coats? Because they would look silly in Macintoshes. What do you call a reformed burglar? Saint Nick.

She said I sound silly. Well, frankly I would rather sound silly than look it. Not that I mean anything by that, of course, but, for example, let us imagine someone who likes to cook, well, stuff.

Today, this person who shall not be named decided that breakfast for us would be something called supoesi. It sounds like some kind of exotic soup, the word does, and that is exactly what it is supposed to be. A hot soup that is traditionally eaten for breakfast in Samoa, made from coconut cream and pawpaw (did I tell you that They sent us a box of tins of coconut cream that are nearing their expiry date?).

Instead of cereal, this morning we had fausi – traditionally it’s made from dasheen, but tell me where we are getting it at this time of the year. So she made it from pumpkin… and, you guessed it, served it with a caramelised coconut cream sauce. You lick your fingers after you eat it not because it’s good, but because it’s sweet and sticky. This is one experiment I did not like.

Nothing silly about cooking Samoan food, you might say. Oh no. But imagine wearing a lava-lava in winter. To get into the spirit, she says. I would have thought we ought to be getting into the Christmas Spirit, actually, not be South Sea spectres. Think pareo. Think sarong. Think gooseflesh.

At this point, I recalled the Guess Who’s Coming to Criticize Dinner? of The Simpsons – the one where Homer is a restaurant critic with Lisa as his ghost-writer. The French chef concocts an éclair dripping with chocolate so dark that light cannot escape. It has over one million calories, 25 pounds of butter per square inch… and a dash of poison. The dénouement is that he didn’t eat it after all because someone told him it was low-fat.
I guess I must thank my lucky stars that she didn’t go the whole hog – or rather, the less delectable portions of the sea slug. The drink, called Sea for some obscure reason, is made from the innards of this creature. If push came to shove, I’d rather have Kava, made from the ground roots of pepper plants… with a mild tranquilising effect.

My Shadow

Prompt: Which Poem Would You Ban from the School Syllabus?

Tanja CiliaNovember 18, 2009 at 6:26 pm

http://www.bartleby.com/188/119.html

One poem I would most certainly ban because it will have a lethal effect on young impressionable minds is “My Shadow” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

It is clear that this poem will unhinge the minds of children, because it will make them as obsessed with their shadow as the poet appears to be, and they will not be able to walk straight along the road if, as in the Irish Blessing, their shadow falls behind them, because they will be forever turning around to check whether it is still there.

They will also do naughty things like throw stones at windows and climb walls, to see if their shadow follows suit.
Indeed the poet knows that the fixation with his shadow has taken over his life and challenged his mental stability. He insists that he can see the shadow jump into his bed before him. Now we all know that this is ridiculous because there is no shadow that would willingly go to bed at night when it can have so much more additional fun, accompanying the Sandman out on his Darkness Rounds.

The poet says his shadow is alive – what nonsense! He says it grows longer and shorter as he feels like. It is clear that the poet was sleeping during his geography, physics, biology and chemistry lessons, because he would have known that an shadow is only the product of one’s imagination and as such will only grow fatter and thinner and longer and shorter and wider and narrower and bigger and smaller according to how much the imagination feeds it and I have run out of breath so I will stop here.

He does not realise, by the way, that the shadow sticks close to him because it is his, and no one else wants it.