Presents

Our anniversary I mentioned a few days ago. Remember the pineapple?

So there we are at breakfast, almost. I’m the breakfast getter in our place. My wife does not do mornings. It’s true, she’s even got the tee shirt.

I fill the kettle, plug it in, set up the teapot, open the cupboard to get the muesli, she wanders into the kitchen.

“I’ve got this,” she says and reaches into a shopping bag and brings out a pineapple. For somebody who does not do mornings, this is pretty good.

We laugh. We cut the pineapple. We eat it for breakfast as if we are Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip.
(Except younger.)
(And better looking – both of us.)
(And with a more functional family.)
(And … OK, it doesn’t really matter …

We exchange presents. She opens my gift to her and starts laughing – it’s a funny present. “I almost bought this for you!” she says. I suppose I kind of bought it for myself anyway.

I get to work late. “Let them guess,” I say to myself.

Pineapples

Bit of a hurried post here. I’ve just listened to the morning news and before going to work I have to get this distraction out of my head.

I’m a bit aware of wedding anniversaries at the moment. My wife and I celebrate 32 years tomorrow. My wife is a saint to be able to put up with me. But I knew that 32 years ago.

Back to this morning’s news. It was of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip celebrating 60 years. Good on them, I say. She’s the first British monarch to reach such a long lasting marriage. That’s because her predecessors were married to men like Henry 8th, I suppose.

OK, back, again, to the news report. They listed some of the things the royal couple got for wedding presents back in 1947, the years of post-war rationing. Among the presents was that of the Queensland Government. That’s not where the queen lives, Queensland, it’s a state of Australia.

Apparently the official gift from the Qld government was 500 tins of pineapple. I don’t know about you, folks, but I reckon that is one very unusual wedding present.

So as the news finished I said to my wife, “Do you want me to give you a tin of pineapple tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow? What’s tomorrow?”
I looked to see if she was awake. She was. Then she woke up.
“Oh, tomorrow. Is it our anniversary tomorrow? Is today the 20th? I’ve lost track of the days.”

So there you have it. Rack up one point for the male of the species to remember the day ahead of his wife.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest I’d better get going to work. Nobody ever forgets the day there. The guys I work among in the prison know their release dates and how many days to go no matter how far off.

I can see the conversations coming up already. “Thirty two years? You don’t even get that for murder.”

With pineapples you get either the rough end or the sweetness.

That’s life for you.