We all enjoy our Vegemite
14th March, 2007
As I peered into the kitchen bin, it occurred to me that genetics were a powerful force. "Ah hah!" I grunted as I saw the familiar yellow and red label half hidden behind a pale green slice of bread. "Just as I thought." Extracting my head from the bin, I called towards the main bedroom in our apartment. "Would you, by any chance," I asked my pregnant wife, "have thrown my jar of Vegemite into the bin?"
"It was disgusting," she said, which I took as an admission of guilt. "I went to have some but, thank God, checked the expiry date before I did. It was six months past the use-by date. And has anyone told you that no one is using lime green bread this season? White is the only fashionable colour for bread." I was prepared to concede her point on the bread. I had been meaning to toss it out for ages, but it's not hard to find something more compelling to do than tossing out old bread.
"I had two jars of Vegemite," I said, regaining safer ground. "One as back-up."
She spoke the truth. There was another jar, this one unopened, lying in the bottom of the bin.
"Vegemite does not go off!" I yelled. "It is the one foodstuff known to mankind that does not succumb to the passage of time. There are probably jars of Vegemite sitting happily in refrigerators around the city that were produced before we were born."
She couldn't help it, of course. Her mother is one of the great thrower-outers of her time, anything more than five minutes past its alleged expiry date being hurled into the bin. Realising the futility of pursuing the argument, I changed the subject.
"How go the driving lessons?" I asked.
As we left the building, we met the on-site manager of the apartment block.
"Have a bit of trouble the other morning?" he asked.
I turned to my wife but she was walking down the corridor shaking her head. For a few seconds I relived the terror of that morning, the electronic eye that failed to stop the gates closing, the metallic rattle as they moved closer, my failed attempt to accelerate through the narrowing gap, the crunching "clang!" as they locked on my car, my panic-stricken struggle out of the driver's seat and the frantic fumbling with the keypad as I tried to punch in the security code while the gates continued to munch into my car.
"It could have happened to anyone," I said when I caught up with my wife.
As we drove very carefully through the garage gates, I thought, not for the first time in my life, that in the eternal male-female contest, all a man can ever hope for is an honourable draw. |
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