My mother does not cook. She has fed her family for twenty-five years using a process known as “food assembly.” Food assembly involves cutting and chopping, adding water to various items, and putting things in the oven or microwave. Dinner guests are perfectly aware that 80% of their meal has come pre-prepared and will often turn to my mother in between courses and compliment her. “This is excellent, Lyn. Did you make it? AHAHA OMG HAHA.”

As a result of all this culinary ineptitude, I have no idea how to do basic things such as boil rice or fry fish. If I had my own house, and you came to visit, and I pleasantly asked you, “Can I get you something?” it would be a filthy lie, because I could not get you anything except a glass of wine. I can, however, make an acceptable carrot, walnut & banana cake, because my father is a most excellent baker.

As a kid, Dad spent every afternoon after school at either one of his grandmother’s houses, where they taught him to bake, sew, and stay away from black people. He’s pretty crafty in all areas of the kitchen and he can mend a button before you can say, “Why doesn’t your wife do that for you?” Visiting men often frown at my father as he zips around the kitchen in his apron, stirring frantically and humming to Rick Wakeman. “I’ve got to get these muffins on before my aerobics class starts,” he would explain, and I’d be even just a bit more proud of him than I had been fifteen seconds earlier. Oh yes, my father may have done the cooking, the cleaning, the sewing, the ironing, and the fruity gym classes, but he was just as talented at changing the oil in my car or mowing the lawn. The only task I ever saw him defeated at was attempting to rename a word document on his computer.

Unfortunately, because my father wanted to teach me important things in life, like how to use condoms and mix prescription medications safely and play the Pink Panther theme on piano, he never imparted his domestic knowledge to me. And rather than observing him closely to learn what I could, I simply sat back and enjoyed being waited upon, cooked for and cleaned up after.

So now, between my stints of living at home, I walk the streets of Sydney with tatty clothes and a growling stomach. I can still make that cake though.

Being the curious little tacker that I was, I once asked my father how old he was when he first got trolleyed.

“Me?” he said, “I’ve never been drunk!”

And being the adolescent pisskop that I was, I then asked him what he did for fun as a youngster.

“I once threw buckets of dirty water on my grandmother’s fence,” he confessed.

And I decided not to admit that I had stolen money from his bedroom to buy weed.

Dad: “How far away is dinner?”

Mum: “About two metres.”

Dad: “HAHA. How long will it be?”

Annik: “I’d say the pork’s around 20cm.”

Dad: “You’re all wankers.”

As usual, the annual Boxing Day visit with my grandfather was brightened this year by his 82 year-old girlfriend.

“I like a tall man,” she shared, “None of these goddamn little squirts. Annik, how tall is your boyfriend?”

“I’m not really sure. I think he’s about 5’9″?”

“Well that’s no good. You should get a new one.”

My father treats a lot of old folk in nursing homes around the Hills, and they are all nuts. Based on the anecdotes he shares about these visits, I am definitely going to stuff him and Mum into a home the moment one of them loses their glasses and then finds them on top of their head.

Some snippets:

• At a certain Christmas Carols charity concert one year, a mature lady did not feel she was being given enough attention as everyone was looking towards the performers on stage and not at her. In an admirable effort, she stripped down to her birthday suit and strutted up and down the aisle of the nursing home’s dining hall while waving her arms above her head. Obeying instructions from staff to ignore this particularly attention-seeking patient, the other geriatrics simply stared ahead and continued to watch the carols. Undeterred, the naked lady walked to the side of the stage and unplugged all the speakers, then climbed on top of one of them and began singing her own carols.

• One blind patient was admitted after she fell and broke a hip while frantically going through her house searching for her missing husband. When the paramedics were called to attend to the blind lady, they discovered her husband hiding in a wardrobe, giggling at his visually-impaired wife’s inability to win Hide and Seek. In an apparent attempt to make amends, the husband would visit his blind wife at the Home for lunch every day. The nurse would place a plate in front of each of them and explain to the blind lady, “Your peas are at twelve o’clock, your potatoes are at three o’clock, your ham is at six o’clock and your carrots are at nine o’clock.” The old man would smile at the nurse, wait for her to leave, and then reach over and spin his wife’s plate forty-five degrees.

• Foolishly, I accompanied my father on a call to a nursing home when I was about eleven. Bored and wandering the halls, I got talking to an old bird who pulled me into her room with the promise of a gift. As I silently assessed my nearest emergency exits, she shuffled around her kitchen opening and closing cupboards and muttering to herself. “Why don’t you let me go and we’ll just call it square?” I suggested, but she had apparently found what she was looking for and pressed an apple and a pear into my hands. ”I got these for you,” she lied as I backed away. Out in the hall, I shoved them into the nearest fruit bowl and then made my father take me home.

• Another lady ate all her blankets, then bitched about being cold at night and having a sore tummy.

Earlier this year, a blogger friend asked me to be a bridesmaid in her upcoming wedding. Deciding that this was probably as close as I would ever get to my lifelong dream of being a Flower Girl, as there is not an overly high demand in the current economic climate for twenty-two year old Flower Girls, I accepted.

A frequent visitor of bridal forums, my blogger friend had come to learn many new acronyms. Most of these were fairly self-explanatory (eg MIL = mother-in-law, and so on), but some were already deeply ingrained in my brain as something else entirely.

“You will be fabulous as a BM,” my blogger friend said to me in an email.

And all I could imagine was myself being eaten, and then defecated, by a giant monster.

Concerned about the oddities of my family, I recently asked my boyfriend whether he likes my parents.

“I like your dad,” he replied.

My brother, trying to explain dungeons and dragons to my mother:

“It’s like telling a story, but it takes fucking ages.

So one nerd says, “Holy shit, there’s a big scary dragon over there!” and the next nerd says, “Well I’ll shove a rocket launcher up its arse,” but the first nerd says, “You can only shove a rocket launcher up its arse if you roll a six or more….nope, sorry, you’re dead.”

Then they wish they had friends.”

When I was a kid, my mum befriended a lady from church who had two daughters either side of my age. Preferring to be stronger, faster and more intelligent than my playmates, I chose to spend most of my time with the younger daughter, Kate. We would dress up her dolls and take them into the garden, then climb onto the roof while our mothers weren’t looking.

One afternoon, we were crawling through some bushes when Kate suddenly turned to me and said, “I did a poo in my pants.”

“Flush your undies down the toilet,” I advised.

“Alright,” Kate agreed and walked gingerly back into the house. I followed her and stood outside the bathroom door for a few minutes.

“Kate?” I called out, “What does it feel like? The poo in your pants.”

She paused for a few seconds, then answered, “Bees.”

It wasn’t until much later that I wondered when she ever had a pantload of bees to contend with.