In Bed with Jocasta Read Online Free Page A

three tomatoes with the bad bits cut off, and five broken Saos. And to think the Italians claim to have invented antipasto!
Mi scusi,
Mario: we’ve had it for years.
    Mick’s Fry-Up
    My friend Mick believes that if it’s food, then you should be able to fry it. Especially after a big night out, when the human body craves the soothing balm that is cholesterol. Chops, eggs, bacon, kippers, chicken kebabs, tomatoes, mushrooms and bread — according to Mick — all yearn to be flung into a pan with a large quantity of butter. Yet, like many of Jamie Oliver’s recipes, this one takes some preparation.
    Step 1: Go to pub the night before, and marinate own brain in alcohol, being careful to top up levels should any drying-out occur.
    Step 2: Awake with shocking hangover.
    Step 3: Remove entire contents of fridge and fry in butter.
    Step 4: Eat until consciousness returns.
    Step 5: Serve single glass of orange juice, thus rendering healthy all your behaviour of the last twelve hours.
    Fridge-Light Dessert
    A delightfully simple recipe, this is the way dessert is served in most households, on most nights. Each diner should approach the fridge during a separate TV ad break and, standing in the illumination of the opened door, root around until they find something worth eating. A square of cooking chocolate, an abandoned Easter egg, the crusty dregs from a carton of readymade custard. If questioned by other diners, you should rapidly swallow, and deny you were up to anything.
    As tasty as Jamie’s Lemon and Lime Cream Tart? Perhaps not, but truly
wicked.

2
    Then she sighs. It’s a long, bleak sigh,
slipping from her lips with a mixture of
exhaustion and self-pity. As best I can decode
it, it contains within it the narrative of how,
twenty years ago, an intelligent young woman
with options in life made a series of decisions
which led her, in middle-age, to be driving at
30 kilometres an hour over the Anzac Bridge
with a moron.

Vice Squad
    I n the building trade, everything has some bizarre, slightly Yorkshire-sounding name, designed to cause humiliation once you arrive at the hardware store.
    ‘Hey George,’ the main bloke will yell out, shouting down to his wizened offsider at the back. ‘Guess what this bloke wants to do? He’s going to use a crumpin pin to fix his nondles.’ At which point, thirty tradesman in overalls will turn to face the counter, in their excitement sending flying to the floor countless packets of scrogin bolts, grommet flanges and grogan pipes.
    ‘He’s got his nondles mixed up with his scrogins,’ they chorus as one, laughing merrily, and lurch into a little dance, all the while casting admiring glances at each other’s spondles.
    Sometimes, watching them, I’d like to insert a grogan into each of their blurgin pipes. Except, of course, for the ever-increasing price of grogans.
    I’m only here, in the hardware store, because large cracks have just appeared in our new bathroom floor — the bathroom floor I’ve only just finished installing. Plus the toilet creaks every time you come near it.
    It seems I stuffed-up the level of the joists when I rebuilt the floor. Which means that each time you approach the toilet you’re greeted by a loud and apprehensive moan.
    Jocasta calls it the ‘talking toilet’ and says we should have hired a tradesman. she’s right. The joists are stuffed, but so are the bearers, the soffets, the tindrills, the blagdorms, the rafters and the reefers.
    Mind you, it was Jocasta who encouraged this current spate of DIY — or Destroy-It-Yourself, as we now call it. she’s the one who bought me the portable workbench, designed to clamp wood or piping at various angles, and costing a fortune. A fortune so great that, finally, in mid-life, I realised I’d become a man with expensive vices.
    The portable bench has some sort of fancy marketing name, like the Bloke-O-Matic or the Handi Guy. It’s solitary. It’s portable. It’s a vice. And yet it’s still approved by