NAN’S THEORY TAKES CAKE
Flan’s overloaded house has that sinking feeling — but he just can’t settle for anything less
MY tiny house on 711 square metres of largely unusable Mudgeerababarian swamp is settling.
The walls and floors are groaning, making a sound my Nan made when she stood up from her knitting chair leaving only an imprint of her truly impressive buttocks.
When she sat, Nan’s Clydesdale-esque hindquarters made her knitting chair moan like a teenager who’d just ran out of wifi. Her magnificent bottom was a result of all the cake that kept her cups of tea company.
That woman could scoff any kind of cake in a twinkling. Nan’s pantry always contained banana bread in a cake display stand with a sticker – “In case of emergency break glass”.
Nan would have woofed down uranium yellowcake if you served it with a “lovely cup of tea.” There’s nothing quite like a sweet treat with a halflife of 100,000 years. God rest her gentle soul.
Her doctor told me that by the end of her life Nan shared 99 per cent of her DNA with a rainbow sponge cake.
Upon closer examination I realise that I have absolutely no idea what causes a house to settle.
Obviously gravity plays a leading role. I imagine all the joins hidden behind the plasterboard are wiggling their way loose and creaking like Nan’s nobbly knees.
Looking around, I can only conject that the major contributor to my house groaning is all the stuff in it.
A sinkhole that’s about to swallow my groaning house whole could also be a contributing factor. It’s probably widening like a smile as we speak.
I’ve collected so many things over the years that the Earth’s crust is finally saying “You know what, stuff you. To the molten subterranean sea with you. Say hello to my little friend the sinkhole!”
I sense when the sinkhole finally claims me that my last thought will be positive. I know in my heart that as I tumble into the planet’s ever widening piehole and fall toward the piping hot liquid magma at the Earth’s core, I will be thinking
Nan would have woofed do wn uranium yellow cake if you served it with a ‘lovely cup of tea’
“Now I get it! My house was settling because of the 3,957,678 truly useless trinkets I shoe-horned into it.”
It makes me wonder how much all this dross cost me over the years? If I could recoup all the money I ever spent on bric-a-brac I may not have any more mortgage repayments to make.
After all, who really needs a wild eyed troll on a surfboard? How many of my grandfather’s shoehorns does one man need given I never use one ever? Did all that cake give our grandparents’ generation chronically chubby feet?
Is life on earth truly only bearable when you have five silver balls on strings that keep clacking together for ages after you start them?
Would I really forget to “hear no evil” if I didn’t have a porcelain primate to remind me?
“I wish I could see no bricabrac evil right now” I say to a ceramic simian who insists he can’t see me.
The more I watch renovation shows and flip through design magazines, the more I realise truly good-looking rooms have very little in them. Think jail cell but call it “industrial chic”.
My on-air partner at Hot Tomato, Emily Jade O’Keep-Nothing, tells me all the time, “Get rid of it, Flan. Chuck it out. It’s just clutter. For God’s sake sell it on Gumtree” with a defeated look in her eye.
She’s right of course. I should make some money from this kaleidoscope of crap. Fill someone else’s house with it and get paid for the privilege of having less to kick your toe on.
I can only imagine the smile that creeps across your face as your victim loads your wonky filing cabinet onto his ute and disappears over the horizon leaving you to grieve with the 40 bucks he slapped in your hand. So I took a peek online. I haven’t managed to sell anything yet but I’m thinking about buying a mobility scooter known as “The Rocket” at the low, low price of $600.
Incredibly the mobility scooter is in the same country town my Nan hailed from: Narrandera, the gateway to Gateau.
I might catch a train down and ride “the rocket” home.