Sighted: UFOs (Head For The Hills!)

Most people spend the first day of the new year suffering a hangover, catching up with their sleep after spending all night in church or hosting / attending a new year’s day party.

I spent mine defrosting the freezer.

Before the image of a domestic goddess springs to mind, I have to confess that it was the search for The Last Sausage that led me in there.

It was 10 am, I was famished (sending ‘Happy New Year!’ text messages around the world is hungry work) and decided to rustle up some breakfast…‘rustle up’ being defined as chucking stuff into the microwave and sending text messages while waiting for breakfast to be served.

The fastest thing to cook (translation: microwave) would be sausages. I remembered seeing a lone sausage in the freezer and headed in that direction.

When I opened the freezer I was confronted by the sight of several UFOs i.e. unidentified frozen objects i.e. bags of this and more bags of that.

I tried to rummage around. No luck, the UFOs were so embedded in ice and in the way of things that I couldn’t see anything. I had a mental image of the poor sausage trapped at the back, crushed against the side of the freezer by a monstrous frozen UFO and resolved to rescue it.

I switched the freezer off and sent more text messages while waiting for it to defrost, then hacked away at the ice with a plastic spatula. At one point during my frenzied rescue mission I thought I heard a faint cry for help from the back of the freezer – could that be the sausage?

Nah twas probably my sanity crying out for help; I was so consumed with finding The Last Sausage that I was starting to act a bit, well, maniacal.

You know how it is when you really really want to eat something, and that something is buried in your freezer behind tonnes of God knows what - you know how that feels, right?

No?

Alright, how about when that ‘something’ that’s trapped in your freezer is the only option to cooking? If like me you’d rather not slice, dice or stir, you’d be as eager to get The Last Sausage out as I was.

Contrary to popular belief, I *can* cook; it’s just not an activity I like to indulge in.

I coped quite well when I found myself home alone a couple of months ago; after I got home from work it was straight to the shower then on to bed. I only ever went into the kitchen to get water to drink and to me it seemed cold and bare without my mum’s cheerful presence and pots bubbling on the cooker.

By the third day I didn’t have lunch at work and - since I hadn’t had breakfast that morning either - was starving by the time I got home.

I opened the fridge and looked around. Six eggs, mayonnaise, three bottles of Benylin (with codeine), water, fresh vegetables and lots and lots of plastic bowls with orange covers.

Peeped in the freezer - more plastic bowls but this time with blue covers.

Inside the plastic bowls were various soups and stews which required a boiled or fried accompaniment…and I was in no mood to boil or fry anything.

I phoned my mum. “There’s no food in this house!” I complained.

“Of course there is” she said, and listed the contents of the various bowls.

“Yes I know, I saw them.” I replied “What I meant is, there’s nothing that’s ready to eat.”

“You mean there’s nothing that someone else has prepared for you.”

“Exactly.”

The next day I came home fully prepared, with a beef sharwarma to fling in the microwave. I even put it on a plate and on a tray, in order to upgrade it from a heavy snack (eaten while still in its paper wrapping) to ‘a light meal’.

And so it was until my mum - who loves to cook and says so everyday - came home.

Back to how I spent January 1st 2008; after I got the UFOs out of the way and found what I was looking for, I cleaned the freezer, re-packaged, re-labelled and re-arranged the stuff in the bags, only to find that it was nearly 1 o’clock in the afternoon.

My search for breakfast had ended as a find for lunch and I was too tired to even enjoy the damn sausage.

I may not cook but hey, at least I clean.