| My Dad's Fridge |
| Pix's Column | |||
| Tuesday, 22 September 2009 08:24 | |||
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The brief: watering the plants while your dad's on holiday. The reality: eating all his food.My dad's gone on holiday and that means I'm on watering duty. While he's enjoying America and his two dogs are living it up at the kennels, about 50 loyal pot plants have stuck around to defend the place from burglars. I don't know how they achieve this - possibly tripping them up or shooting seeds into their eyes - but either way, I need to pop round every now and again with a watering can to stop them going all brown and crinkly. In theory this is a relatively quick task. I'd drive round after work, pop in, head out the back to fill the watering can and pour some water over ludicrous numbers of plants around the greenhouse, back yard and bath and then go home (my dad consolidates all the upstairs plants into the bath because he thinks I'll forget to water them if they're in lots of different rooms, which is absolutely true). In, out, five minutes max. What actually happens is that I get in the door and head for the kitchen cupboards with the focused glee of a truffle pig. It's a treasure trove in there: nuts, chocolate bars, cereals, dried fruit, weird biscuits he got free on a train in Korea, Cadburys Roses dating back to 2003. I go a bit crazy when I'm on my own and faced with this amount of snack food. 24 years of me switch off and hand over control to my inner five-year-old and then, 15 minutes later, I come to my senses surrounded by foil wrappers and pistachio shells having consumed twice my recommended daily allowance of calories. Then I water the plants and go home. The level of snack food has mushroomed since I moved out of that house. For most people this would be a bad sign, but not for my dad. He was a bit chubby when he grew up, then got so slim at university that his parents barely recognised him, and since then he's developed a bizarre automatic cut-off mechanism which stops him eating anything unhealthy after a couple of bites. Most people can't make a chocolate bar last an hour; he can make one last four months. I think he might be a robot. So, the fact that the cupboards, counters, fridge and kitchen table are strewn with an eclectic mix of Lindt bars, Ritter squares, flapjacks, wafer biscuits and salted peanuts is not remotely worrying. It just means my dad likes a bit of variety in his one-and-a-half chunks of chocolate a day. This stands in stark contrast to my attitude to snackery. Seeing a snack and eating the snack are so tightly linked in my personal chain of cause and effect that they are technically the same event, so back when I lived with my dad he knew that any chocolate left in plain sight was not long for this world, and he used to hide it. But you can't hide things from your family - especially not sweets. My familiarity with that house's cubbyholes reaped dividends when I was left to my own devices. I would regularly raid the hiding places and eat something small enough to go unnoticed and then, a few days later, would raid them again and discover that my dad hadn't eaten any more, and I'd wonder if I could eat another bit without him noticing and then I'd eat one anyway. This pattern would repeat until eventually I'd get so bored of waiting for him to eat his chocolate that I'd just finish it off myself. That meant he'd find out I knew about his hidden snacks, but of course he knew anyway. He knew that I knew that he was hiding them, I knew that he knew that I kept eating them, and he knew that I knew that. The whole situation had its own special harmony, a delicate chocolatey ecosystem which placed just enough meaningless barriers between his food and my stomach for the snacks to survive a little longer. Now that I don't live there, he doesn't need to hide them. But it also means that when I go round to water the plants while he's on holiday, the gloves are off. I just hope he said goodbye to that box of Choco Leibniz before he left. Get a chunk of RollZero delivered direct to your inbox with the weekly Electric Letter. Sign up in the header at the top of this page.
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Sofi makes this comment
Tue 22 Sep 2009 15:24:12 CDT