Fish on Fridays

Nora once told me that Friday's lunch was the her favourite part of the week. I hadn't thought of it that way, but I guess it was like a party - my kids loved Fridays because dinner was leftover Fish and Chips - Nora, Marlene, and the others, loved it because there was wine.

Marlene is well... how to describe Marlene... she is unfailingly polite, as if eternally grateful that we're working here. Like Nora, she is a chainsmoker, and she doesn't always seem to be "all there". She almost looks like a caricature of herself: round circles of red rouge on either cheek, bright red lipstick, lashings of blue eyeshadow and permed hair. Marlene is up and out of the village every morning after breakfast. Where, I hadn't a clue, but it was her daily routine, and she was never present for lunch - except on Fridays. Every Friday was Fish and Chips. There was only one resident who turned it down. (It was Dawn, the round lady with her chin permanently on her chest, and she always had a slice of Thursday's left-over meatloaf instead. Shudder.)

It was one glass per resident, which we poured in advance and took in trays to the dining rooms. It wasn't usually my job to serve Marlene's dining room, but one day there was a new girl and I grudgingly agreed not to send the poor lamb to the slaughter make her job difficult by subjecting her to Barrett and the Royale. So we swapped.

I had only just given out the wine in the Barrett dining room when Marlene asked for another. This was new to me... but why not, so I went back to the kitchen to get more. It was only after finishing dessert that I overheard another resident also giving her glass of wine to Marlene. Oh, dear. This was not going to be good - she sometimes reminds me of a miniature Hunchback of Notre Dame who shuffles along unsteadily, grinning from clown makeup.

I spoke to Maria about it, who agreed that while they were adults, we kinda had a responsibility not to get them sloshed on a Friday afternoon. Maria, in turn, asked the residents not to hand their wine around to each other. Problem solved, right? Wrong.

The following Friday I turned down Marlene's request for more wine, using the porky pie that we'd been told we weren't allowed. She looked utterly crestfallen. But it turned out she had planned in advance anyway! Sweet Bette, who wasn't a drinker, had today asked for a glass - which she handed to Marlene later. (It's not like she'd have remembered not to, anyway.) Several other residents were only too happy to also give theirs to Marlene. As far as we can guess, she managed to get four glasses down in less than half an hour.

Maria found her sprawled in a Barrett hallway, with her skirt hiked all the way up, wearing red high heels and stockings with suspenders, and giggling non stop.

The thrill of cricket

Another pearler from the land of the retired people otherwise known as My Work.

Today half the staff went for first aid certification. We commandeered one of the residents' communal lounge rooms. (Marjorie would have been annoyed. Her normal daytime ritual from 8 until 5 is to sit in there and stare.)

It was pretty heavy going actually. I was only refreshing mine because it's expired, but most of the others had never had any exposure to first aid at all - typical were enquiries about putting butter onto burns and spoons into the mouths of epileptics (don't ever use either!). To his credit the teacher made much fun of the fact that "Grandma's advice was always terrible" and managed to get a laugh from most of the ill-informed. Add to the discovery all the acronyms to remember (EAR, RICE, CPR, and all the others) and I think we were all pretty grateful for the lunch break.

Forget the residents - we normally have this unspoken rule that if they're eating in there, we don't. Screw that. I sat down with a plate of veal cordon bleu and stir-fried vegies and began stuffing my face.

The discussion at the table next to me was somewhat interesting. Someone commented on Dizzy's double century. Yes, for the non-cricket people, that's 200 runs, and Jason "Dizzy" Gillespie recently managed 201 not out, which is an amazing achievement. Now unlike the glory days of the 80s and 90s, not everyone in this country can name the Australian cricket team members. So a fair few of her dining companions were intrigued by whom this big-scorer was.

Doris translated "Dizzy" into Jason Gillespie, which unfortunately left most of them still in the dark about the mystery man. Doris is, of course, a veritable expert on everything. I say that in all honesty - the lady has the most phenomenal memory.

"Isn't he a young man?" one of them asked (I think it was Ester, who's an absolute darling, but looks as if she's about 150 years old). Doris to the rescue. "He's thirty-one" she supplied emphatically. Doris probably knew his star sign, favourite colour and where he went to school, as well. At about this time, Dawn had migrated from her table to theirs, to join in the discussion. "I like him. He's a nice looking young man." Mumbled agreement from Ester, who had apparently seen him before and thought he was indeed a nice looking man. "Of course, he used to have long hair," says Dawn, and I could almost hear their jaws hit the floor. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, elderly people still regard long-haired men as Beatnik leftovers who are not to be respected in the least.

"He's much better looking now that he's cut off his hair," insisted Dawn. Dawn is a little old lady who's on the round side and who dresses in cardigans a lot and whose chin is rarely high enough off her chest for you to look her in the face. I had a sudden visual of her camped in front of her tv and drooling over the sexy, sexy, sexy young man in the cricket whites and the baggy green cap. It was becoming difficult to concentrate on my food without exploding in laughter. It was time to make an exit.

I stood up and began to collect my cutlery to move into the kitchen, and meanwhile they were all still discussing that he was quite a good looking man. Then Ester dropped the bomb.

"Is he married?"

I stifled the giggles as best I could. Praise be to the being which gave old people poor hearing.