Once you become something of a player in the mens-wear business, sooner or later people will start coming to you for fashion favours. Not always a great advantage but one fine November morning Richard’s phone rang with a matter both urgent and welcome.
‘Richard Opie.’
‘Richard. It’s Ron.’
Richard beamed. His secretary had not seen him smile this much since he inked the deal with the Bones Corporation.
‘Ronnie. What can I do for you?’
Dad could hear in Richard’s voice that he was smiling. This made him nervous, but he chose to ignore it.
‘Look, I’ve got a family wedding this weekend and I really need a new tie.’
‘Absolutely, Ron. Describe your suit.’
‘Now, Richard, before we go any further, I have to tell you that this is really important.’
‘Of course, Ron.’ Richard’s smile was very broad now and Dad could hear it.
‘I mean it, Richard. The wedding is for Pammy’s side of the family and I could really do with some good public relations after the last wedding.’
‘The last wedding?’
‘I’d rather not go into it.’
‘How am I meant to decide on a tie if I don’t know what public relations disaster I am trying to overcome?’
‘Ok. There may or may not have been some inappropriate dancing with the mother of the bride. But that’s not the point. The point is I need a good tie.’
‘Getting back to where we began, describe your suit for me.’
‘I’ll be wearing a navy pinstripe and a white shirt. I just need something simple and conservative that doesn’t scream “life and soul of the party”.’
‘Not a problem, Ron. I will make a tie especially for you.’
At nine o’clock on the morning of the wedding, Richard promptly arrived with the tie. Dad lifted the lid of the box to check that there would be no surprises. He confidently expected a tie in the shape of a fish or embroidered with the phrase ‘I get first crack after the divorce’, but what he found inside the box was a charming red tie that matched his suit perfectly.
‘It’s perfect. Thanks, Richard. I really appreciate this.’
‘All part of the service, Ron.’
‘Seriously. You’re a real mate. I can always count on you.’
‘That’s true, Ron. I am nothing if not reliable.’
It wasn’t until that afternoon, when Dad was getting dressed, that he took the tie out of the box, only to discover that it was in fact an eight-foot tie.
As my father didn’t wear ties that often, the irregular length was initially lost on him. He struggled with it for about ten minutes. Most of that was spent trying to choose a sensible starting position for the broad and narrow ends of the tie. Then, after a few false starts, he made a valiant attempt at a windsor knot. After this failed miserably, he figured perhaps a shelby would be more appropriate. This came out worse than the windsor, and so a four-in-hand was called for. Compared to attempts one and two, this was a disaster. Figuring that he may have been on the right track to begin with, he tried a half-windsor. Who knows? Maybe he just gave it too much windsor. It wasn’t until the end of the tie hit the floor for the fourth time that Dad noticed my mum was looking on in hysterics.
‘What’s going on, Pammy? Is this length the fashion now?’
‘Not quite, Ronnie,’ she said through hoots of laughter.
‘Bloody Richard!’
Mum was really laughing hard now. Partly because the tie was hilarious, but partly because when my father dresses, he has a habit of putting his pants on last. As a result she was looking at her husband, in a shirt, socks and underpants, with a tie that started normal at the neck but ended in a crumpled coil at his feet and a look of confused fury on his face.
‘Well, what am I supposed do with it?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe tuck it into your shoe?’
As it turned out, this wasn’t far from the eventual solution. For the entirety of the wedding, my father had to keep his jacket fully buttoned, lest he reveal that a good three feet of tie was stuffed into his trousers. At least, thanks to this precarious set-up, there would be no inappropriate dancing.
9
A Tale of Two Toilets
For a short while, life returned to normal for the Opies and the Pickerings. Richard went back to making regulation length ties for commercial purposes and Dad went back to dispensing medication and pretending to drink pregnancy samples. Everything was as it should be. The only thing that took place that was even a little out of the ordinary was the renovation of the second story of our house which began in the summer of ’89–90.
Anyone who has ever lived through a renovation will tell you that it is one of the most godforsaken, pain-in-the-arse activities you can subject yourself to. There are pitfalls, drawbacks, disappointments and wholesale fuck-ups that are almost impossible to predict and even less possible to prevent. The people you assume to be experts often turn out to be cowboys, deadlines you thought were inflexible bend on a whim and on an almost daily basis you find yourself thinking, ‘I must remember every detail of this because I know that one day I’ll be repeating it to a current affairs reporter.’
Yet people persist with this masochistic farce. Why? I put it all down to propaganda. Do you know a phrase you never hear? ‘Our renovation was finished ahead of schedule, came in under budget and exceeded our expectations’. Do you know why you’ve never heard that phrase? Because renovations occur in the real world and phrases like that occur only in the fantasy land of radio advertisements for companies that perform renovations.
And advertisers aren’t the worst offenders. A chronic overabundance of renovation shows on television have given regular people like you and me a dangerously unrealistic expectation of the ease and success of home alteration. In this ‘house porn’ all we see is some well-built guy enthusiastically pounding away at a wall with a sledgehammer, never breaking a sweat, and giving the camera a calm smile that says he could renovate for hours on end without needing to take a rest. Meanwhile, his buxom co-host with the cut-off shorts and immaculate hair is such a natural at painting and decorating that she never gets so much as a spot of Island Tide splashed on her blouse. They can work solo, in pairs, trios, or groups and never miss a beat. And when these dynamos finish the job, their hair is still as perfect as when they began.
What you don’t see are the false starts, tears, swearing, injuries, floods and genuinely relationship-threatening conflict. You don’t see the three-day argument over a tap. You don’t see an architect, a carpenter, a plumber and two homeowners all pretend to do a poo in a woeful attempt to settle a disagreement over what height the toilet roll holder should be placed at. You don’t see the living room piled high with a whole family’s worldly possessions because all of a sudden they have no upstairs to keep it in. You don’t see the builder and the dad uncover the adolescent son’s secretly stashed copy of Playboy or the awkward conversation which follows that evening when the adolescent son comes home from school. You don’t see the grandparents shipped off to a six-week lawn bowls and poker machine retreat on the Gold Coast while the family moves into their two-bedroom house because theirs is no longer deemed liveable according to UN human rights standards. And you don’t see the youngest child, the aforementioned son, miss out on a bedroom at said grandparents’ house and end up sleeping on the floor of the dining room with the family dog. These are the things the renovation shows don’t show you.
From memory, I only agreed to go along with the ‘reno’ because I had been lured by the promise of a larger bedroom. But as with all such promises, the devil was in the fine print. I was never told I would have to sleep on a floor, I was never told that my family would be set to full-time-grumpy for a whole four months and I was never told that while my new bedroom would be larger it would also be noticeably smaller than my sister’s.
All of that now said, there were some good things that came of the renovation. First, every
one got a sink out of the deal. My parent’s en suite had two sinks, my sister’s and my bathroom had two sinks. We were a four sink family. Among numerous other tiny blessings, this meant no more holding toothpaste in your mouth while waiting for someone to finish washing her hands because she’d pushed in after going to the toilet. This may seem like a tiny improvement, but after dealing with this kind of sink negotiation over a number of years it represented a giant leap towards family harmony.
The other great windfall of the renovation was that we had a surplus of toilets. The two upstairs toilets had been replaced and we were left with two perfectly good porcelain thrones with nowhere to go. We contemplated just leaving them on the nature strip out the front of our house and letting someone take them but in the end we decided against that on the off-chance that someone actually tried to use them. The repercussions were too hideous to risk.
Instead, Dad and I decided that with a little effort they could be put to very good use. First, they were filled with soil and potting mix which, combined with their innate drainage properties, made them excellent flower beds. We then waited for the first cold snap of winter and planted daffodil bulbs. When spring arrived a few months later, the bulbs sprouted and began to flower, and they really were something to behold. The crisp white of the porcelain contrasted with the black of the soil, created the perfect frame for the bright splash of yellow provided by Mother Nature. They were arguably quite beautiful and Dad and I were justifiably very proud—we had made the mature transition from minor tomfoolery to high art installations. Great art is often controversial, and these toilets were definitely designed to polarise. Personally, I may not know much about art, but I know what I like. And I what I like is a handful of daffodils growing out of a commode. Sure, some would argue that they were just a couple of old dunnies with some flowers stuck in them, but that’s the great thing about art: it’s open to interpretation.
Once the daffodils were in full bloom Dad and I decided it would be wrong not to share our artwork with the wider world. And where better to place them than at the entrance to Richard’s business headquarters so that anyone coming to meet Richard, creator of high quality silk ties, had to first pass through this rather surreal, and highly sanitary, welcoming station? The toilets were there from eight in the morning, yet it wasn’t until four in the afternoon that anyone thought to mention this to Richard.
Dad and I thought this was fairly hilarious until three months later when we returned home from a long weekend away to find that the two toilets had been cemented to the tops of the columns on either side of our front gates.
Allow me to repeat that.
CEMENTED to the tops of the columns on either side of our gates. CEMENTED. WITH CEMENT.
They were labelled ‘Ron’ and ‘Pam’ and hanging from one was a sign that read:
RONNIE’S SEAT OF POWER
And on the other was a sign that read:
PAM & RON:
SIDE BY SIDE THROUGH THICK AND THIN
My dad’s first response was ‘Brilliant!’ His second response was to declare the first ever ‘Pickering Family Edict’. Standing at the front of the gates he pointed a finger loftily to the sky, just as one might when starting a revolution or, indeed, indicating where the ceiling is.
‘All right! Pickering family edict!’
‘What’s that, Dad?’
‘Go with it, son. Pickering family edict. The Pickerings will no longer be going on holiday.’
He paused to stare momentarily into our fallen, baffled faces before going on,
‘It only leaves us vulnerable to attack.’
And so it was an uneasy truce existed between the two families. It was less a lasting cessation of hostilities, than it was a precarious peace born of a complete absence of opportunity. And thus it remained until one day in 1991 it was decided that the Pickerings and the Opies would holiday together.
10
The Winter Campaign of 1991
The week-long ski trip planned for the winter of 1991 was no small undertaking. Four families of four had to coordinate school holidays with time off work and miraculously match them with a lodge booking at the height of the winter season. This, combined with costs of ski hire, lift tickets and groceries that all seemed to be indexed to altitude, meant that compromises had to be made. In short, any romantic notions of alpine chalets, jacuzzis and jumpers worthy of a Nordic Bill Cosby can be dispensed with immediately.
According to the brochure ‘Valhalla Lodge’ was a ‘spacious alpine hideaway for sixteen people offering a modern kitchen, cosy lounge room and great selection of games for the whole family’. In reality it had four cupboard-sized bedrooms, each with bunk beds for four, that offered a closeness and intimacy that the average family seldom survives. We had to get dressed one at a time because there wasn’t enough floor space to simultaneously have a suitcase open and more than one person standing. Being the youngest I would go last, so my day would start by watching my family dress themselves one-by-one, right at my bottom-bunk eye level, until I eventually had the room to myself. At the end of the day, the order would be reversed. Being the youngest, I had to go to bed first and then lie there watching my family strip off and change into their pyjamas. These are memories that will never leave me. Never.
It was all worth it, though, because we loved to ski. It was one of the few activities we did as a family that we all enjoyed equally. Sure, there were other things we all did together, but they were invariably for the benefit of one person. We went to antique car shows for Dad, on steam train rides for me and to art galleries for Mum. For the twelve months we went horse riding every second Sunday, my parents smiled through bruised thighs, chafing and the smell of manure because horses were my sister’s number one priority. But the snow was the one place where every smile was real, every laugh was genuine and every joyous moment was shared equally by us all.
Admittedly, this had not always been the case. The first time I ever went to the snow I was four and showed absolutely no aptitude whatsoever for cold climate activities. When my mum would take me out to play in the snow, I would grow frustrated with my gloves and immediately throw them on the ground. In seconds I would begin crying because my hands were cold. My mother would dutifully put my gloves back on my hands but within moments I would once again become furious and jettison the gloves. The crying would then resume, my mother would pick up the gloves and the cycle would continue. After an hour or two of these high-altitude high jinks my mother took me inside and sewed my gloves onto the ends of my sleeves. Back out in the snow and with the avenue of glove removal no longer open to me, I simply defaulted straight to the crying. Looking back I acknowledge that there must have been times that my mother loved the snow more than me. As I stood there snivelling in the alps, if she had been asked to choose between the snow and her son, she would have been well within her right to say, ‘Well, I have known the snow for quite a long time . . .’. But by 1990 I had acclimatised. The snow was a magical frozen playground where I could fall over as much as I liked without breaking anything.
However this particular skiing trip did not begin well. A blizzard set in on the first day, making the mountain miserable and skiing impossible. After a glum breakfast, the four families crammed into the ‘cosy lounge’ and tried to make the best of a bad situation. Cups of cocoa were circulated and we raided the games cupboard for some family-friendly fun. To everyone’s significant disappointment, the ‘great selection of games for the whole family’ consisted of an incomplete deck of Uno, a slightly soiled Kerplunk, an early edition of Mousetrap with three pieces missing and one dirty playing card from a 1974 Playboy Playmate commemorative deck. Needless to say that Miss July, AKA the Queen of Diamonds, got a fairly enthusiastic reception, while the other items received lukewarm indifference.
Around 9.45 am, after the inevitable confiscation of Miss July, sixteen people settled into the most pointless game of incomplete Uno ever. The ‘draw four card’ was downscaled to a draw two card, becau
se to draw four would have terminally depleted the remaining supply of cards. While the point of regular Uno is to get rid of all your cards while forcing others to pick up what you put down, our version revolved around the principle of keeping the game going for an infinite amount of time while being on the lookout for any excuse to leave the room.
At 10 am, the men declared that as much fun as they were having, they were headed to the pub while there was a gap in the weather. Sensing an opportunity, the kids made their excuses and went outside to start a snowball fight with the lodge across the road. The women, finally having the lodge to themselves, took over the kitchen and started cooking a special meal to celebrate the start of our alpine sojourn. If this sounds a little bit like the fifties, they were probably doing it to match the decor of the lodge.
At the pub Richard introduced the men to slivovitz, a Balkan spirit of which about ninety per cent is alcohol. The remaining ten per cent is a cheeky mixture of plums, violence and regret. The other remarkable thing about slivovitz is that ‘slivovitz’ is statistically proven to be the second hardest thing to say when you have been drinking slivovitz. After two or three shots, if one attempts to order a fourth the most one will get out are a few valiant attempts. ‘Shlivivivi . . . Slavovo . . . Slobodan Milosevic . . .’ At which point confusion sets in and one tends to get dizzy and throw up on one’s trousers. For those who are curious, the most difficult thing to say when you’ve been drinking slivovitz is, ‘Goran Ivanisevic defeated Yevgeny Kafelnikov in a five set upset.’ This borders on impossible and has, on at least one occasion, caused a man to swallow his tongue. One final noteworthy slivovitz fact: nobody in history has ever said the phrase, ‘Oh no, one slivovitz is enough for me, thank you. I think I’ll turn in for an early night.’
Impractical Jokes Page 8