Thinking Strange Thoughts

I was just sitting here feeling a bit peckish and dreaming about my mom’s famous rabbit stew. It was mainly famous for its lack of rabbit, she would just boil up any old veggies she had lying around for a few hours and then give it a good stir with her lucky rabbits foot. Some people with amazingly sensitive taste buds, were certain that they could detect a taste of rabbit in the stew, personally I think it was just the taste of the bacteria on the lucky foot.
I’ve always been a bit sceptical about the value of the lucky rabbits foot, obviously it was not very lucky for its previous owner, otherwise he would not now be hopping about minus a foot, so I do not see why it would be any luckier for its new owner. Now the lucky elephants testicle is another thing entirely, there could well be something in it, though I’m not sure that I would want one dangling from my key chain. Mind you, I would get a good argument off my Uncle George, he was a great believer in that sort of thing. He was very superstitious and would not leave the house unless he was wearing his lucky underpants. He actually wore the same underpants for thirty six years, funnily enough he never married, he used to say that he had never met the right woman. Mind you, I reckon if your going to go on a date wearing a thirty six year old pair of y-fronts its got to lower your chances.
Another thing that he was very particular about was walking under ladders, he thought this was tremendously unlucky. In fact it was whilst he was avoiding walking under a ladder that he stepped into the road and was flattened by a Double Decker bus, so there could be something in it. Following the instructions he left in his will, we buried him in his lucky underpants, although I always felt that a coffin would have been a lot more practical.
Anyway I’m still feeling peckish and I got to thinking, one thing that has changed nowadays is that nobody argues over the crust. When I was a young lad, my brother and I would race home from school to get the bread first and grab the crust off the end. This was considered a great prize, especially covered in “dripping”. “Dripping” was basically fat, my mom would do a roast on a weekend, then pour the fat into a bowl, when this congealed it became the great delicacy “dripping”. If I could get home from school first, grab the crust and slap a couple of kilos of “dripping” on it, I was in heaven. Of course, you have to remember cholesterol had not been invented yet, so eating a bucket of fat a day was considered quite healthy. My granddad used to eat tonnes of it, he always used to say it was very good for your eyes, and its true when the heart attack killed him his eyes were in tremendous condition.
Nowadays you can’t give the crust away, when our grandson stays with us he eats everything in the house except the crust, and I dare not even mention ‘dripping’ to him for fear we would never see him again. I told him that my mom always used to say “eat your crusts, it will make your hair wavy” He was kind enough to point out that it had made my hair so wavy that it had waved goodbye. Mind you now I think about it , she only said it would make my hair wavy, she did not say where. I have some wavy hair growing out of my ears so maybe that’s what she meant.
Stephen Ainley...dripping with strange thoughts
Copyright of Stephen Ainley