Fighting Fire With Fire; Burning Down The House

   'Allo 'allo, I do trust everyone has had a lovely time and just handfuls of sexual favours in socially inappropriate places this last week. I can't wish you any better than that, I can't really. We've had some things happen here, things that resulted in the kitchen smelling more or less perpetually like a plastic braai and made my sister sound like Kathleen Turner for a little while, so it couldn't have been all bad.
   Let's start with the bigger, bolder, more pressing events. This.

   I was asleep, as is my constant bent, when I heard the most god-awful racket in the kitchen slash outside-ish. My directional hearing is terrible, so really I suppose it could have been happening in the neighbour's yard and I wouldn't have known, but perhaps being half deur-die-kak helps my spidey sense. I heard what I was quite confident must have been a burst water-pipe, with flood torrents happening in a violently vertical direction, and my sister's panicked screams for her fiancée Barend 007. There was the tinkle of glass and a massive BOOM, and I'm just hearing "ARE YOU OK?! ARE YOU OK?!" and in my mind the earth had opened up in the front garden like a Roland Emmerich film. Needless to say, I hightail it to the action so fast I spin my wheels on the spot like the road-runner or Barney Stintson when he's heard about a new Robin Sparkles video.
   It takes me two steps to realize that my sleepy-arse has surmised this situation very incorrectly indeed, since the whole house not only smells of Nylon Burgers, but looks like the last few minutes of Dante's Peak.

   My dad had apparently been making some chips on the stove, and at my behest had run out really quickly to get some *cough*cough* cooldrink *cough* before the store closed. He had- in a most uncharacteristic display (in fact, we might even refer to this kind of thing as "pulling a Loraine")- forgotten the oil on the hot stove plate. It caught MADREFUCKING FIRE, and even whilst being the tiniest little pot that ever there was managed to engulf the whole kitchen in such flame as to threaten to singe even the dogs' eyebrows off.
   Estelle and Barend 007 (who has in his tenure here also managed to single-handedly fight off a grasshopping burglar who was jumping from yard to yard ended up landing in ours- big mistake, buddy) raced in and doused the thing- look, it was quick thinking and all, and probably saved everyone's asses from burning to a crispy bacon, but he chucked a glass of water at it, which caused it to explode. I think in that situation, there's little room to debate yourself on what the fuck to do, and the first thing to come to mind is often the only thing to be done so I bravo him nonetheless. He Will Smithed (presumably in slow motion) with a ball of fire at his back as he threw himself bodily from the kitchen. Had his reflexes been dulled by the kinds of quantities of Coca-cola and pizza I tend to consume whenever humanly possible, he would have looked like the Phantom of the Opera right now. 

   It's not entirely evident in this picture, but the whole kitchen, from the stove to the front door, have been blacked out like dragon's breath. Despite my heroic efforts to hint for pizza, my dad decided that he'd clean up the oily part of this mess and put down some newspaper for the glass just so as to allow him to re-do dinner. The rest, in true Birkenstock fashion, could wait until fucking later. Amen brother, amen. We've even contemplated leaving it like that and telling people that it's an interior design element. Hey, I watch Design Star, I think we can get away with it.
   Other design features in our house include:
  
   1. The time Virginia's son, Remember, was asked to climb into the roof to retrieve a cable because he was the tiniest of all the fully grown people who could legally be asked to do so. It was stressed to Remember (and yes for my non-South African readers, that is his actual name) that one is to step on the beams only, the BEAMS ONLY, lest one fall arse-over-tit through the flimsy cardboard that dares to call itself a ceiling. He Forgot.
   2. The tiles the previous owner- a self-proclaimed DIY king- put in so shittily that they are now pulling loose all over the house and subsequently breaking into millions of tiny little pieces that everyone keeps stepping on in unexpected places and at unforseen hours of the morning.
   3. The axe that happened to Estelle's door a few years ago. Long story.
   4. The spot in Estelle's old room where the ceiling fan decided to end its life of servitude and spontaneously make a run for it, leaving that room without a main light or (rather obnoxiously in this heat) without a fan.
   5. The creepy face that started appeared on the ceiling over my father's bed a while back. Supposedly from water damage after heavy rain leaks through the roof, my theory involves voodoo priestesses and the avenging spirit of an eternally damned rugby player from the turn of the last century. Nothing that eerily accurate happens by chance, say I.
   6. And last, but certainly by no means my least favourite design feature in our interesting house- in my room, the redundant window. This window looks out onto another room. It's a small and almost comically useless room, resultant from the DIY king's brilliant idea to turn the porch into indoors. He never closed up the window, so if- as has happened in the past- someone actually occupies that room, me and that occupant get to know each other in rather embarrassing detail. I can now identify my uncle Eric by his snore at a pace of half a kilometre.

   Something other. Me and Estelle were placidly taking down washing from the line outside the other day, in a picture perfect ad for Omo washing powder or Vanish Power 02. It was a sunny and highly saturated day, and we were but a few scripted lines away from being able to claim residual checks from Stasoft for the next five years.

  

   You see, much to my constant and ever-loud chagrin, we don't have a tumble dryer. Yes, yada yada yada, first world luxuries, yada yada, the privilege of a washing machine in the first place blah blah superfluous windows etc etc, but boo. Most days I don't mind so much the hanging up of the washing or the taking down of the washing, but on this fateful day, as I retrieve my lovely, freshly laundered clothes, I espy-

   Some ass-fuck of a nipple-wanking bird has managed to shit-bomb my one piece of white laundry with such anus-shirvelling accuracy as to make a grown man weep. Not only that, but it is a deep, rich purple, as though this particular pest-addled plague-monster holds himself to only the highest in vegan berry standards, and refuses to eat nought but the very best in mulberry pickings. COMICALLY-SIZED, LOW-SWINGING HORSEBALLS.

   Happily though, another Merlin episode happened this week. These are becoming a highlight for me. Besides for this week's Big Bang Theory episode which had me about this close to losing all functional control of my bladder, I couldn't have asked for better than this. After mentioning Merlin in my last blog post, my dad requested I load up the back episodes for him, which I squeed about a bit. I love getting the man hooked on new and interesting forms of TV-crack- why, I remember back when I got so involved with Friends for the first time and he insisted to me in a near rage that it was little more than a soapie, and not worth getting so invested in. Now he wakes up at six in the morning on a Saturday to watch Eastenders, which I lovingly call his Stories.
    Since he's still catching up to Merlin, I won't spoil too much about the episode, but I will mention that there was one moment I literally had to watch a couple of times over for its sheer LOL-ness. Then there was this, which holds a very decent second place: Merlin has to sneak into Arthur's room to steal a key, which is something that happens to the poor boy about once every fortnight. When he's caught, he has to cover up his strange behaviour somehow, and this is what he comes up with.

    Then, later, he must sneak back in to replace the same key, and is caught in the act again.

   I had to painstakingly sit through a whole episode of Fawlty Towers to get those screenshots- the things I suffer for this blog. You're welcome.