#SundayColumn #SummerDisaster #Humour August 24, 2014

I rarely discuss the few problems one comes across at the club as I have managed to avoid them by resigning from most of the standing committees I used to sit upon. Many of them had to do with management problems such as salaries, theft and where to send the mad. I recall a case dealing with one aged waiter who insisted that various mems were sitting on his pet mouse and so kept shouting: “Stand up, you assassin, Harold can’t breathe.”

We could not have that, as it would lower the tone of the place. He now rests comfortably Up Island at the Bent Willow, a home set aside for insane waiters.

However with all that, I am still required to deal with Mrs. Hynde-Quarters‘s late summer cocktail and dinner party. Can one think of a more foul way to end the season than to find oneself closeted with people convinced they are the aristocracy of our small city of 83,000 souls?

She pretentiously calls the soiree “Fin de Siecle.” Anyone who would name a jumped-up party “The End of the Age” needs watching in my books. But that is the sort of thing a senior mem of my club has to put up with, especially as my wife is a “dear” friend of the bloody woman.

Therefore I found myself on a late August afternoon struggling to make sense of what was going on around me, while holding a warm, not to say weak, gin and tonic, and struggling to stay upright on an uneven lawn listening to the cognoscenti surrounding me.

A professor within earshot (with that foghorn tenor voice more than a few of us were within earshot) was going on about the ancien regime at the University of Victoria, a place much younger than me. But this is how the tenured talk, apparently, their look of premature greyness helped by a full beard denoting wisdom in their and their colleagues’ eyes, rarely teaching anymore, saving themselves, no doubt, for nightmares like the one I found myself in.

First let me describe the house in whose back garden I now suffered, clinging to a few other dragooned male mems against the back fence. The property had once held a blameless house with a gingerbread philosophy, William Morris meets Beaux Arts, if you will.

Mrs. Hynde-Quarters quickly did away with all that, so now stands something more along the lines of the Albert Speer school of thought: an imposing, dull and dreary lump of stone.

Yet another professor and a city councillor were going on about the house and its genius loci – I tell you, they talk like this. Then we were called inside for the formality of the “dinner.”

If I found the garden food gelatinous and appalling, I soon realized the caterer (the mayor’s brother) was just warming up. The soup, which I am sure was ersatz clam, brought an abrupt scream from the seatmate to my right. As he later said upon recovery, it seemed to cauterize the soft tissue of his mouth and continued bubbling as the victim kicked the underside of the table. Upon seeing that vivid example, most of us gave it a miss.

Our hostess took on a sort of nil desperandum look – things have got to get better. The next course, or “triumph,” as it said on the menu, was something pop-eyed and swimming in its own juices. It was not at all pleasant to look at, as it seemed covered in recent freckles.

The chap on my left said it he had seen an outrage like it in the Sudan, something to do with boar or small camels. Most of us began to frantically eat the bread. Suddenly the caterer (Arnold) threw a match at the “thing,” which brought on a conflagration the size of which might be found at a scout jamboree.

Several women who had no eyebrows to begin with only received a tan, but several old men with large cultured eyebrows took on the appearance of Blackbeard in battle, that is every hair engulfed in flame. Lawsuits are pending.

I remember saying in the aftermath of the now famous dinner, “Sic transit gloria Swanson” to the now-clean shaven professor, who did not take it well. It was the only joke I could remember from my long-ago Latin class.

Copyright Major’s Corner 2014

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