Our Drunken Mistake of a Toothfairy

When I was growing up we had an issue every time we lost a tooth. Our tooth fairy NEVER remembered to come.

Now my mother did her best to explain the situation. She told us elaborate tales of our alcoholic tooth fairy that couldn't quite get it together.

She suggested I draw huge signs to tape all around the house so the tooth fairy couldn't miss them. No matter how ridiculously drunk she got. So I spent hours drawing huge posters to direct the tooth fairy.

But the tooth fairy still forget. The more the tooth fairy forgot the more my mother explained.

I was so fascinated that I wanted to meet this drunken mess of a fairy. So as any child would do I lay in wait.

Which inevitably lead to a certain amount of surprise.

and of course the only logical conclusion.

My Brother's First Words

My mother had three girls before she had a boy. So when my brother came along we all thought he was going to be some sort of magical creature. We watched him with intent waiting to see what this new kind of baby would bring to the table. At first he was sort of cute.

He did silly things and made us all giggle. 

But as time moved along it became clear he was a little special. At the age of two-and-a-half the only words anyone had ever heard him speak were "baa, baa" while pointing at whatever he wanted.

We were beginning to get bored. Even his most ridiculous floor-dance routines failed to make us smile. 

We began to reconsider this whole having a little brother thing.

My mother became irate. She watched my brother intently and tried to get him to speak. It wasn't long before she was calling everyone she knew and looking for any advice she could find. God help her if her son was going to be a little bit of a dimwit.

Soon we started to ignore even his cutest "baa, baa's". We didn't even notice anymore when he emptied his cup of milk over his head (one of his more subtle attempts at grabbing our attention).

Then it happened. We were having a perfectly ordinary family dinner. My brother had poured milk over his head and the rest of this were making enough noise that the neighbours, who lived a good half mile away, could probably hear everything.

From the baby chair there was a thump and the sound, clear and loud, of my brothers voice. 

We were shocked into silence for the first time in the history of our family dinners. My mother, about five minutes later, was the first to react.

She started bouncing up and down with excitement. Her son was not a dimwit. She treated us all to a long list of possible professions he might pursue now that he was a child-prodigy. She gabbed on the phone to everyone about how: "Well, I mean he just waited until he could form perfect sentences, he's just not going to waste his time doing anything by half-measures." We, on the other hand, were a little disappointed. There had been a certain comfort in thinking he was stupid and there was certainly no comfort in the fact that he was now being considered some sort of child genius. 

Student Life: Staying in and Studying (Cat Videos).

It gets to that point in the semester when you realise you might actually have to submit some assignments. That's what happened this weekend in our house. Suddenly we were all faced with deadlines and tests and there was no way to avoid it. As responsible adults we decided to stay in and study. We retired to our rooms and at first things went well.

It lasted a couple of hours before one of us got distracted and started sending the others life-changing videos from youtube. 

Soon we were all sitting in our rooms pretending to work. I tried my best to pen a verse or two, but simply ended up writing ridiculous ditties about cat videos. 

The spell had been broken. A break was needed. So we spent the next three hours drinking tea.

We found out things about each other as we wiled the hours away with heart to hearts. 

It was clear no work was going to be done. I decided to try out a new pilates regime. Sure it would cleanse my mind of viral cat videos and get me back to writing semi-coherent sentences. Bored, one of my housemates watched and gave pointers.

The whole episode resulted in a catastrophic loss of balance and some minor facial injuries. 

While I sat cursing the pilates ball. My housemates bounced about on it like two hyperactive three year olds. Displaying their version of interpretive pilates. 

We seriously needed to get back to work. But our concentration was waning. We needed food. Rather than order something in, or make something quick like well-adjusted adults who have their priorities in order, we decided to spend a couple of hours cooking ourselves a proper meal. 

Then there was the time spent consuming the spoils of our efforts. In the moments that followed nothing mattered except for how much food we could fit into our mouths without looking like complete heathens.

Revitalized we stood up, ready now to take on the world of study. We made it half-way across the living room before we started dropping like flies as the food hit our stomachs. 

We may not have gotten any work done. But by process of trial and error we did finally figure out what the pilates ball was good for. 

My Big Fat Greek Nightmare (Part One of Three)

Full time jobs with sensible career options are hard to come by in our current economy. So you can imagine that after I quit mine, in a fit of self-righteous morals, I panicked a little. Actually it might be more appropriate to say that I had a bit of a melt-down. During which I came up with highly probable worst-case scenarios.

Then, as we all do during our various crises, I turned to the master of the universe, the source of all our knowledge and the one that can answer even the most ludicrous questions.

After a while I had figured out what I wanted to do with my life. I did at least half an hour of thorough research on Google images and made sure I had a realistic visualisation of what my plan would result in. 

I was going to spend the summer on what looked to be a small Greek paradise. I would bar tend a little and lounge about a lot. I prepared myself accordingly and so it was that a month or so later I was skipping off to Greece equipped with three bottles of water-proof factor 50 sun block. What could possibly go wrong?

It was all going smoothly until we got to Athens airport and we got to see the rust-bucket that would be transporting us to the tiny island of Karpathos. 

Tactfully the air-crew attempted to distract us for the first five minutes with jellies. Presumably so we wouldn't look out the window and notice that the planes wings appeared to still be under construction.

But I was not fooled. I gaped out the window, knowing I was doomed.

It wasn't long before I forgot all about being in a rust bucket though. I was joined in my tiny seat by possibly the largest women that had ever been on the plane. I tried not to stare, I tried to give her more of my seat and be polite. I was thwarted when our air hostess came down with a seat belt extension. I'd never seen one before and the fact slipped straight from my mouth.

 We sat in the most uncomfortable silence. I thought of ways to make it up to her. Small talk about weight watchers? Maybe ask her about the island? In the end the perfect opportunity arose. We were given complimentary peanuts which my seat-partner managed to swallow in one impressive gulp. 

The way I saw it she really liked peanuts and I really didn't. So considering it a peace offering I brandished my own bag and smiled at her: "Would you like mine too?" It's probably clear to any rational person that this wasn't the brightest move. I was expecting a grateful smile and to see her impressive one-gulp-bag-of-peanut-consumption trick again. But that's not what I got, oh no, this is... 

At this point, I gave up. I sat there in awkward silence and listened to the plane rattle. We eventually landed and hysterical laughter broke out across the passengers. I'm quite glad they waited till we landed to erupt into nervous fits as hysterical communal laughter would have terrified me any earlier in the flight. We had to bus across the car park to get to the airport. It was swelteringly hot and they drove us the impressive distance of fifty meters to the small white building. To be honest I was quite relieved I was already feeling over-heated. 

I landed in Karpathos and waited in baggage collection where I was met by my boss and the chef that would be cooking our meals. 

They took me to eat at the Taverna and to meet the other brothers that helped run the business. The chef was a great big Romanian man who didn't appreciate me telling him that he sounded a little like Dracula. He went off to cook me food, after it turned out that their version of "I can cook you anything," meant " I will make you pasta."

I then sat eating my pasta in front of a row of brothers and the chef. There was one brother who seemed to only know how to grunt and sneer, my boss who rambled on about parties, his other brother that kept talking about God and Greece and then the chef who asked every two minutes "How is the food?"

I tried to remember their names, I tried to imagine who the grunting brother had murdered and why and mostly I thought about getting back on the plane. But it was only day one, so I settled for sitting there and trying not to look like this...