Impractical Jokes (13 page)

Dad and I thought this was fairly hilarious until three months later when we returned home from a long weekend away to find that the two toilets had been cemented to the tops of the columns on either side of our front gates.

Allow me to repeat that.

CEMENTED to the tops of the columns on either side of our gates. CEMENTED. WITH CEMENT.

They were labelled ‘Ron' and ‘Pam' and hanging from one was a sign that read:

R
ONNIE'S
S
EAT OF
P
OWER

And on the other was a sign that read:

P
AM &
R
ON:
S
IDE BY SIDE THROUGH THICK AND THIN

My dad's first response was ‘Brilliant!' His second response was to declare the first ever ‘Pickering Family Edict'. Standing at the front of the gates he pointed a finger loftily to the sky, just as one might when starting a revolution or, indeed, indicating where the ceiling is.

‘All right! Pickering family edict!'

‘What's that, Dad?'

‘Go with it, son. Pickering family edict. The Pickerings will no longer be going on holiday.'

He paused to stare momentarily into our fallen, baffled faces before going on,

‘It only leaves us vulnerable to attack.'

And so it was an uneasy truce existed between the two families. It was less a lasting cessation of hostilities, than it was a precarious peace born of a complete absence of opportunity. And thus it remained until one day in 1991 it was decided that the Pickerings and the Opies would holiday together.

10

The Winter Campaign of 1991

T
he week-long ski trip planned for the winter of 1991 was no small undertaking. Four families of four had to coordinate school holidays with time off work and miraculously match them with a lodge booking at the height of the winter season. This, combined with costs of ski hire, lift tickets and groceries that all seemed to be indexed to altitude, meant that compromises had to be made. In short, any romantic notions of alpine chalets, jacuzzis and jumpers worthy of a Nordic Bill Cosby can be dispensed with immediately.

According to the brochure ‘Valhalla Lodge' was a ‘spacious alpine hideaway for sixteen people offering a modern kitchen, cosy lounge room and great selection of games for the whole family'. In reality it had four cupboard-sized bedrooms, each with bunk beds for four, that offered a closeness and intimacy that the average family seldom survives. We had to get dressed one at a time because there wasn't enough floor space to simultaneously have a suitcase open and more than one person standing. Being the youngest I would go last, so my day would start by watching my family dress themselves one-by-one, right at my bottom-bunk eye level, until I eventually had the room to myself. At the end of the day, the order would be reversed. Being the youngest, I had to go to bed first and then lie there watching my family strip off and change into their pyjamas. These are memories that will never leave me. Never.

It was all worth it, though, because we loved to ski. It was one of the few activities we did as a family that we all enjoyed equally. Sure, there were other things we all did together, but they were invariably for the benefit of one person. We went to antique car shows for Dad, on steam train rides for me and to art galleries for Mum. For the twelve months we went horse riding every second Sunday, my parents smiled through bruised thighs, chafing and the smell of manure because horses were my sister's number one priority. But the snow was the one place where every smile was real, every laugh was genuine and every joyous moment was shared equally by us all.

Admittedly, this had not always been the case. The first time I ever went to the snow I was four and showed absolutely no aptitude whatsoever for cold climate activities. When my mum would take me out to play in the snow, I would grow frustrated with my gloves and immediately throw them on the ground. In seconds I would begin crying because my hands were cold. My mother would dutifully put my gloves back on my hands but within moments I would once again become furious and jettison the gloves. The crying would then resume, my mother would pick up the gloves and the cycle would continue. After an hour or two of these high-altitude high jinks my mother took me inside and sewed my gloves onto the ends of my sleeves. Back out in the snow and with the avenue of glove removal no longer open to me, I simply defaulted straight to the crying. Looking back I acknowledge that there must have been times that my mother loved the snow more than me. As I stood there snivelling in the alps, if she had been asked to choose between the snow and her son, she would have been well within her right to say, ‘Well, I have known the snow for quite a long time . . .'. But by 1990 I had acclimatised. The snow was a magical frozen playground where I could fall over as much as I liked without breaking anything.

However this particular skiing trip did not begin well. A blizzard set in on the first day, making the mountain miserable and skiing impossible. After a glum breakfast, the four families crammed into the ‘cosy lounge' and tried to make the best of a bad situation. Cups of cocoa were circulated and we raided the games cupboard for some family-friendly fun. To everyone's significant disappointment, the ‘great selection of games for the whole family' consisted of an incomplete deck of Uno, a slightly soiled Kerplunk, an early edition of Mousetrap with three pieces missing and one dirty playing card from a 1974
Playboy
Playmate commemorative deck. Needless to say that Miss July, AKA the Queen of Diamonds, got a fairly enthusiastic reception, while the other items received lukewarm indifference.

Around 9.45 am, after the inevitable confiscation of Miss July, sixteen people settled into the most pointless game of incomplete Uno ever. The ‘draw four card' was downscaled to a draw two card, because to draw four would have terminally depleted the remaining supply of cards. While the point of regular Uno is to get rid of all your cards while forcing others to pick up what you put down, our version revolved around the principle of keeping the game going for an infinite amount of time while being on the lookout for any excuse to leave the room.

At 10 am, the men declared that as much fun as they were having, they were headed to the pub while there was a gap in the weather. Sensing an opportunity, the kids made their excuses and went outside to start a snowball fight with the lodge across the road. The women, finally having the lodge to themselves, took over the kitchen and started cooking a special meal to celebrate the start of our alpine sojourn. If this sounds a little bit like the fifties, they were probably doing it to match the decor of the lodge.

At the pub Richard introduced the men to slivovitz, a Balkan spirit of which about ninety per cent is alcohol. The remaining ten per cent is a cheeky mixture of plums, violence and regret. The other remarkable thing about slivovitz is that ‘slivovitz' is statistically proven to be the second hardest thing to say when you have been drinking slivovitz. After two or three shots, if one attempts to order a fourth the most one will get out are a few valiant attempts. ‘Shlivivivi . . . Slavovo . . . Slobodan Milosevic . . .' At which point confusion sets in and one tends to get dizzy and throw up on one's trousers. For those who are curious, the
most
difficult thing to say when you've been drinking slivovitz is, ‘Goran Ivanisevic defeated Yevgeny Kafelnikov in a five set upset.' This borders on impossible and has, on at least one occasion, caused a man to swallow his tongue. One final noteworthy slivovitz fact: nobody in history has ever said the phrase, ‘Oh no, one slivovitz is enough for me, thank you. I think I'll turn in for an early night.'

By about the fifth round, all of the men were sitting on a forty-five degree angle. This was only made ok by the fact that they were
all
on that angle and in essence holding each other up. They were like a circle of dominoes placed too close together so that when one fell, the chain reaction merely bolstered the entire circle.

By the tenth round, they were all doing the most infuriating thing a group of people can do in a pub at the snow. They were singing. Loudly. And they were singing one song in particular: ‘There's snow business like snow business'. And seriously loudly. They were like a super-annoying four-man Ethel Merman.

After thirteen rounds, the men had all but lost the use of their bodies. My father was now standing up, but his head was permanently attached to the top of a table. At his hips he was bent at right angles and he was singing into an ash tray. With all subtlety out the window, he had begun singing ‘snow' in place of all the words that even vaguely rhymed with snow. And to make the point even clearer he was drawing out ‘There's
snowwww
business like
snowwww
business, like
snowwww
business I
snowwww
!'

It was about this time that Dad noticed that Richard's most recent chorus wasn't quite as resounding as it should have been. As round fourteen hit the table, he took a close look at it and asked the poignant question: ‘Richard, why does yours have bubbles in it?'

It turned out that Richard had tipped the barman earlier in proceedings and every second round, as everyone else downed the culinary equivalent of aviation fuel, Richard had been swilling soda water. As the group instantly became a mob, Richard offered a feeble explanation about someone having to keep their wits about them to lead the long walk home. Unsurprisingly, the mob didn't buy it.

That's the thing about mobs: they are notoriously unreceptive to rationalisation. This may go some way to explaining why mobs seldom achieve anything positive. Mobs never spontaneously improve the world. I've never seen five drunken guys get kicked out of a nightclub and show their disdain for the system by picking up litter. For that matter, a mob has never, on the spur of the moment, participated in an adopt-a-highway scheme. The closest a mob has ever come to road beautification is deciding that a bunch of witches hats would look much better up a tree.

On this occasion, the mob was focused on the administration of ad hoc justice. Richard, they declared, would need to drink six shots of slivovitz to catch up. Once the sentence was handed down, they immediately launched into a recital of the evergreen classic ‘There's snow business like snow business'. With the din of an anarchic show tune ringing in his ears, Richard drank six shots of slivovitz and immediately regretted being born.

When all the men were equally ferschnickered on thirteen shots apiece, they set off for home, stumbling and singing, the long way around the mountain.

And promptly got lost.

Back at the lodge the snowball fight had escalated. There were now five lodges involved, some of whom had big kids who wanted to hurt us. After four hours of heavy skirmishing, things had settled into a stalemate. One of the lodges had set up something of a sniper's nest on their roof and up there were three big kids with freakishly good eyesight who were accurate throwers. They had a pile of pre-compacted snowballs, could pick off anyone who showed themselves and were holding the entire neighbourhood hostage.

A kid at one lodge had attempted to get them off the roof with a hose, but the hose had frozen, his mum had cracked it and he had to go inside immediately and watch the rest of the fight forlornly from the window. Gee, we envied that kid. He was indoors, safe and warm. We, on the other hand, were pinned down behind a frozen tree, completely unable to move. Pretty soon we descended into trench-talk about all of the great things back home at the lodge.