Opinion

This is a tale about hearing strange voices, a new type of breakfast and cleaning the kitchen.

I’ll start with the breakfast.

Now, when it comes to getting a good nutritious start to the
day, I’ve always been pretty much a traditionalist.

I’ll go through a stage of a couple of weeks where I might wolf down a bowl of porridge each morning while at other times a couple of slices of toast with Vegemite will find themselves sitting in the passenger seat when I’m running late.

Add in the odd egg – boiled, fried or poached as the case may be – and the occasional sausage and bit of bacon come weekends or special occasions, and you’ll see I’ve just about got all the food groups covered.

Naturally, when my long-time companions and I are away on our annual five-day health and wellbeing retreat (read: Golf trip) the delights of the hotel breakfast buffet are well and truly tried and tested. So much so, in fact, we have an annual toast – of the liquid variety – to the inventor of the elastic waistband. I’m sure you get my drift.

Anyway, of late, Mrs P has introduced me to the delights of the smoothie.

To the uninitiated among you, a smoothie is basically a pile of healthy foodstuffs thrown into any type of blender and mixed so you can drink it. The idea is that it’s all super healthy stuff and you can gulp it down with ease – and there’s no fried egg to slip off your fork and down your shirt front.

Depending on your tastes, all manner of things can go into your smoothie.

For this example, I’ll just tell you what Mrs P came up with for me: Water, banana, blueberries, yoghurt, peaches, spinach, chia seeds and flax seeds. Yes, seeds. Don’t ask.

My beloved has been plying me with a smoothie most mornings lately and I have to say it’s not been too bad. I feel a little less bloated than normal and my early morning brain is a little less foggy. Which brings me to another point I raised at the start.

I’ve been hearing strange voices. Sort of. So let me explain.

There I was the other morning sitting in my fave chair awaiting my smoothie when disaster struck. I was out of bananas.

The woman I live with who makes sure I have a clean pair of boxers each day, came up with a great idea. I could go and grab a handful of feijoas from the trees by our back fence. They would be a great substitute.

So, two minutes later, there I was filling a bowl with some of the ample fruit that resides in the branches of the thick screen behind our place.

Midway through the operation I heard a strange voice. “Hello sir,” it said, obviously female and somewhat timid.

I stopped what I was doing and looked at the fence behind the trees.

Just to give you a quick idea, we have three trees on the boundary we share with our rear neighbour. They are old, thick and so intertwined with the fence it is impossible to see through the other side. We’d talked about fixing it up with the old neighbour but figured the only way to do that was to level the trees and start over.

Thankfully, neither of us had much stomach for the loss of the trees and privacy so we just left it alone to get bigger and thicker.

A while ago that neighbour moved on and the place has been rented since by some very quiet people we’ve barely had a chance to say hello to.

Anyway. “Hello sir.” The voice rang out again.

This time I took a step towards the fence and there, under the trees in a small gap between the fence and a couple of branches was an arm holding out a small bag.

I won’t bore you with all the details but it turned out the voice was that of the mother of the new tenant. She hailed from Asia and had a particular interest in drying fruit. She was here visiting and had been looking for something to keep her occupied while her daughter was out. Randomly, she’d grabbed a few feijoas that had fallen off the tree on her side and dehydrated them.

Now she was presenting the “fruits” of her labour (see what I did there) to me as a gift.

Chuffed, I thanked her and took the bag in to Mrs P who added them to my breakfast. And very tasty they were too.

As fate would have it, that was to be the last smoothie Mrs P would make for me for a couple of days. Not long after she’d added the feijoas to the mix the phone had rung and she was called away for a couple of days.

Two days later there I was quite fancying a smoothie and staring down rather guiltily at the bacon and egg McMuffin with extra hashbrowns I’d bought 10 minutes earlier because I was too lazy to have a go myself.

As I normally do – don’t ask me why because I don’t know – I disassembled the McMuffin and ate the two half muffins. Then a thought occurred to me.

Wonder what the remainder would taste like in a smoothie? I figured it all ends up in the same place and all I’d need to do is make it easy to swallow. Can’t be that hard surely? I mean liquid food is what they do for astronauts on their way to the moon isn’t it?

Now obviously I’m not stupid. I know some sort of fluid is the key to not ending up with a hard gooey mess so I opted for a bit of milk and yoghurt to start with then broke up the eggs, bacon, cheese and hashbrowns and put them in. Then I hit the switch.

That’s where the last piece of the tale I mentioned at the start comes in.

I didn’t fix the lid on the blender properly and my “smoothie” shot out into space and crash landed all over the kitchen.

Somehow I think living on the moon might be a better option for me if I can’t clean it up before Mrs P gets home.