Barbecue

The sun shone for five minutes last week so husband declared it to be the barbecue season, inviting family and friends over for blackened burgers and charcoal chicken. His nibs takes charge of turning the meat, a task that instantly turns men into culinary experts. Declaring cooking to be an easy game that women manage to make look difficult, to which I reply that in medieval times the meat turner was a lowly position frequently filled by dwarves, eunuchs or both, so no change there then.

He will site the barbecue at the bottom of the garden and I will be left to fetch and carry from the kitchen food that I have spent several hours preparing; like a good captain he will not leave the bridge even when the ship/barbecue is sinking without trace.

This week it was a barbecue to take his mind off England’s non qualification for the impending European football championship and the Champions league final just past between Satan’s Chelsea and the Dark Lords Manchester United; love idols Liverpool having been eliminated by Beelzebub’s boys in the semis. Husband had come over all Midge Ure for much of the week Ultravox’s Vienna on repeat on his ipod belting out the line, “This means nothing to me, OOOOOOHHH Vienna” with particular gusto.

His mood finally lifted, thoughts turned to spoiling food with charcoal, he rang a few family and friends and invited them over for a barbecue. Just thirty plus people, entertaining and feeding guests is easy when you have got a barbecue, all you have to do is turn meat for an hour. The food will prepare itself, the magic house fairies will clean and tidy the house while the invisible garden nymphs will cut the grass, do the weeding and clean the barbecue up after his last attempt at mass poisoning al fresco.

The day dawned and for once we were blessed with reasonable weather, sporadic sunshine with a steady wind that would ensure we drew our neighbours ire with our wayward smoke.
Adorned in comedy apron, my husband, tongs at the ready, assumed his position by the barbecue and awaited service. As I began to shuttle various types of meat down the garden for execution, our guests began to arrive. First a family who mirror our own with children of the same sex and same age, a sport mad father and a sport weary mother. An elderly couple from up the road. My brother, his wife and two children ????????? Chelsea fans through and through whom my husband pored scorn on whenever their backs were turned (if there was a dodgy sausage going it would be pushed in their direction), Bloody Brandi, The people from the shop, and a quiet young couple who have just moved to the village.

The garden, brim full with guests quickly divided into two camps, ladies chatting idly on the patio, the men migrating to the barbecue to discuss the merits of various types of charcoal and barbecue design. One exception to the male female divide, botox Brandi. She had presented my husband with a Tampa Bay Rowdies baseball cap, which he had coupled with a twenty-year-old New York Mets Basketball shirt he had kept at the bottom of his drawer. My sister in law commenting that she didn’t know that Eminem was doing the cooking, my teenage nephew replying that it was only Uncle Knobhead and how long before they could go home.

Delivering the last plate of meat to its grizzly fate I picked up on a tense atmosphere around the crematorium; A beer fuelled discussion between husband and my brother about the reasons for England’s non qualification to the European championship had developed; there was some dispute about the best position to play Wayne Rooney, and the overall merits of Frank Lampard. To emphasize his point, husband had laid out the sausages in a four four two formation on the barbecue, Wayne Rooney was represented by a chicken drumstick and was required to play in “the hole” The sausage representing Frank Lampard had been fed to the dog. My brother, Chelsea through and through, and keen to defend Lampard’s honour and avenge his canine demise, had responded with an offer to position the Wayne Rooney drumstick in another hole altogether and made the faux pas of trying to move meat on another man’s barbie. Fearing a threat to his masculine meat filled domain, my husband had responded with raised tongs, managing to tweak my brother’s nose as he bore down on the grill of doom and the drumstick called Rooney. My brother cried out in pain, the nephews joining the fray with some street talk about Uncle Knobhead dissing Frank,and his bros hoes moes toes, or something like that before being dragged away by their mortified mother. Brandi leapt to my husband’s defence like a WCW wrestler, throwing plastic chairs from her path before standing between the two barbecue gladiators like Xena Warrior princess hands on hips. Proclamations about land of the free and various constitutions followed, before my husband’s culinary skills came to the rescue taking the wind out of the sails of the main protagonists. The best Generals talk of armies marching and fighting on their on its stomachs, and men having the stomach for battle; when the stomach don’t like it they don’t fight. As the initial effects of ingesting undercooked food began to take effect the fight drained from all involved. My brother the first to respond, forgetting his tweaked proboscis and Lampard’s name being taken in vain to make a dash for the loo. All present in the queue outside the bathroom in common agreement that they would never eat food served from my husband’s barbecue again, despite his explanation that John Terry Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Cole may have been a little underdone but there had been nothing wrong with any of the meat from the midfield, front line or substitutes.