New pet and food musings

The house has a new pet, a Pineapple Conure called Chico. It’s a species of small parrot, very friendly and endearing. It climbs up my daughter’s arm to perch on her shoulder and happily walks around the place when he (or possibly she) is let out of his (or her) cage, which is most of the time. It doesn’t yet fly but apparently will do some day. Chico loves walking around on the floor and yesterday walked into the shower where he tossed his head back in apparent bliss while the water ran on him. Remarkably, our large dog Yogi is not interested in Chico at all, and considering he could swallow the bird in two gulps this is a Good Thing.

Chico pecks, but is marginally less vicious than the cockatoos. These, by the way, have gone to eat the balcony rails and wooden tables of someone else’s house. We were rather fed up with their destructiveness and stopped feeding them. They kept coming back, but in fewer numbers and eventually stopped coming altogether. Unfortunately stopping feeding the cockatoos meant we lost the beautiful crested pigeons who also came for the feed. However, the bush/brush turkeys which came to feed on the cockatoo seeds as well are no loss; they are really ugly birds.

Because I like to keep you all up to date on the household pets, I should record that the extraordinarily boring lizard which took up space in the back room has gone to another home. I can’t imagine a more useless pet. The only way you knew it was alive was its occasional blinking and the fact that you’d find it in a new position every day in its cage.

The lovely big dog, Yogi, is still doing well in his own quiet way and suffers without complaint the attention of the children who all love cuddling and kissing him and climbing all over him. The Church Point mob now have a spaniel puppy which is as cute as the proverbial button. That’s along with their cat which needs a personality transplant; all it ever does when it sees you is run away.

Something was niggling my memory when I described the Pineapple Conure and it’s now come to the fore of my elderly brain. It’s the memory of a delicacy which my mother made if they had guests over and thus absolutely nothing to do with pets. Some segue, eh!

First you cut a pineapple lengthwise so the leaves of the crown lay flat. You then carve the pineapple flesh into cubes along the length of the core. Next step is to apply jelly crystals to the surface of each cube, alternating green with red and with yellow so the flattened pineapple looks like a multicoloured chequerboard. Toothpicks went into each cube so you could pick it up. I guess it was a delicacy because of the amount of time spent on getting it prepared.

Two other “cocktail” offerings which I recall are short lengths of celery with peanut butter along the length and skewers with a cube of hard cheese and an inch or so of pepperoni. These two were not in my mother’s repertoire but tended to appear at any party held by young people. Ah, parties … not my favourite activity. This was largely because in my teens and early 20s I was a little shy. No-one who has known me only in my noisy and ubiquitous days would believe this, but it is true. I was also not much of a drinker and certainly not of Red Ned, the rough red wine in flagons, common at university parties of the time. Again, those of you who only knew me in my whiskey drinking days would find this hard to accept but thus it was.

While I can’t blame university for turning me into an alcohol abuser, it certainly set me on a lifetime of smoking. I was only 17 when I arrived at university and desperately needed a strategy for when I was alone. The finding, lighting and smoking of cigarettes became a piece of theatre which made me feel occupied – and grandly sophisticated! I now know that there is a genetic element in smoking addiction and certainly both my parents smoked as I grew up. And, for that matter, drank, not much but always a whiskey before dinner. My father was somewhat of a wine connoisseur and tried to teach my brother and I about wines. It may have stuck with my brother but didn’t with me. Even in my drinking days I preferred “hard likker” to wine, which may have had something to do with the histamines in wine which tended to trigger very severe headache even up to migraines.

I suffered from migraines for all my life from the age of 11 to the end of menopause (one thing the menopause rubbish was good for!). They arrived each month with a ferocity which left me in a terrible state, needing injections of pain killers to allow me to sleep and let the migraine pass. It was hard to manage when I was out, or at home with the children. If I was Christian I suppose I would say it was a cross I had to bear. I have been migraine-free for some decades now but the memories of those migraine days are still there.

I’ve been in relatively good health most of my life although now the various aches and pains, swellings and sores and very compromised breathing, make me realise how very old I am today. I’ve purchased a few t-shirts to mark my ageing. The slogans are “It’s weird being the same age as old people”, “I don’t know how to act my age; I’ve never been this old before”, “I haven’t lost my mind … half of it just wandered off and the other half went looking for it” and “Grandma knows everything. If she doesn’t know, she makes things up really fast.”.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

The Hungarian-born British writer and humourist George Mikes: “Continental people have a sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.”