Friends, I have been in a dark and terrible place. A place
where you are powerless, unable to communicate with the world, unable to reach
the people around you. Where the comforting sounds and sights of the places and
people you know are lost to you.
That’s right, my friends, I have been without internet. I
have had a long immersion in the communications technology 1990s, and I have
suffered greatly at it hands.
But that’s not really an excuse. I mostly haven’t been
writing in this blog because I’m lazy. Also, because it takes a while to build
up the requisite level of confusion and chaos in my life to actually be able to
write about it. No one comes to read this blog to see how organised and
together I am as a human being. They come instead to marvel at my continued
existence in the face of strange circumstances and abiding personal
incompetence. And so I am proud to return to the internet and say “Yes! I am
alive.” And also “My life is impractical and silly.”
There are a few stories I probably should have written here
as they occurred, so I will try to fill in the backlog in some kind of coherent
way. In the meantime, this is what I have been doing:
In May I quit my job and went to Canada. Quitting one’s job
is wonderful and I encourage all of you to try it. In Canada I wooed a lady,
climbed a little and sent people emails about monoskis. In June I flew to New
Zealand for the winter and waited for it to snow. It didn’t snow and I spent
most of my time in Christchurch where the weather was horrible. Eventually I
bought a car and could leave, which was very soothing. I think I may have
confessed to having a soft spot for Christchurch in the past, but now I think
it is a grim and depressing place where it rains all the time. It finally
snowed in late June and I drove up to Broken River for another season of skiing
and poor personal hygiene. In slightly crazy news, I am working at Broken
River. As in having a job. You read that correctly. I perform services in
exchange for financial remuneration. It is a strange turn of events. Fear not,
I have not completely sold out. I am the backup cook – I cover the real cook
for two days a week feeding the staff and guests. This may come as a surprise
to many of you who have no idea that I have any kind of culinary skill. It is
certainly an ongoing surprise for me. My experience in this job can be best
summarised in two adjectives: Terrifying and greasy.
Cooking at BR is terrifying because I have no idea what I’m
doing. I am completely untrained in this field and have almost no relevant
experience. The only experience I have is cooking as a volunteer in the BR
kitchens last year when the chef left the mountain early in the season and
there was no one else to fill in. I have never worked alongside anyone more
competent than myself or had any real tuition to speak of. The full-time cook,
Ray, has given me a bunch of valuable advice which has enabled me to cut up
roast chickens and do some other useful stuff. Without him I would be in
considerable distress. Each night that I work the guests ask me what we’re
having for dinner and I strenuously avoid answering the question because I’m
worried that if I actually tell them they’ll know when I’ve screwed up. If I
say “Roast chicken” and then we end up eating leftover cake, that looks bad.
But if I just pretend that I was intentionally using the chicken to make the
oven smell savoury while I reheated some cake that looks like I’m some kind of
Heston Blumenthal food genius. Which I am not. People regularly come into the
kitchen to ask if I need a hand and I often tell them I don’t just so they’ll
go away and I can sob and tear at my hair and swear quietly into my pots in
peace. Apparently the food has been OK, which I can only attribute to
beginners’ luck.
Cooking at BR is greasy because, well, there’s grease on
everything. Especially me. I don’t have enough clothes to change for every
meal, and I don’t have time to wash my clothes while I’m cooking so everything
I wear gets covered in grease. This isn’t so bad if I’m just doing my usual two
days a week, but at the moment I’m cooking for five days to cover for Ray while
he goes to Australia to watch a live Pink concert (this is, incidentally, about
the most misleading piece of true information I could possibly give you from
which you could form a first impression of him – whatever you’re imagining
about him, it’s hilariously wrong), so you can imagine what it’s like. Also, I
don’t bathe enough. It’s hard to be motivated to do so when you know you’re
just going to get covered in grease again. A reliable witness has testified
that I smell like felafel, which is a nice way of saying oil. It is actually
disturbing how much oil and butter and cream and salt and stuff goes into food
when you’re cooking for lots of people. Also, deep frying. Night after night I
cannot tell if I have just smoked out the kitchen and dining room (which is
often) of my glasses are just covered in a thick coating of fat (which is all
the time). There is a block of lard which sits on a shelf in one of the store
rooms and glistens malevolently like something from a Stephen King novel. I try
not to make eye contact with it.
I have just one more meal to make to get through this five
day stint. I’m not entirely sure what it will be, but I have enough back-up
cake now that it doesn’t really matter. God help my arteries.
