International Bring Your Own National Dish For Lunch Day Week Thing began on Monday morning. I settled on beef (non-halal) sausages with buttered white plastic bread and ketchup and called it a BBQ, which was cheating, and kind of not-funny, and actually entirely not in the spirit of things. It really didn’t work, sadly, limply, greasily lying in tin foil amongst the tagines and lamb fritters and felafels and carribean donuts. Everyone else’s mum did good. See the array of exotic gastronomic triumphs:
New Zealand – I let you down. Kids – your mother’s sausages are RUBBISH. I am shamed. Witness the dawning awareness on the baby’s face when he realises that his mother didn’t even make the sausages, but bought them from that well-known-non-halal-supplying-supermarket-chain! “Fraud!” he sobs.
And I was sat at a table with Noah, and his Canadian/Filipino little Jehovah’s Witness mate, and their Sri Lankan school buddy, and they ate a bit of everything, except for the sausages.
This morning, the entire exercise was repeated for Barnaby’s year, but with a new and innovative twist: The sausages were (non-halal) LAMB!
And were equally as unenthusiastically received. So, there you go. A little less successful than I had hoped. It started to get embarrassing when I kept getting asked where I was from, and what I had brought.
Ah, New Zealand.
And, ah, see that big pile of sausages? The untouched ones? Yeah.
No, I didn’t make them. I just bought them from the shop.
I started to get into the whole thing about pavlova, and if we could have bought along dessert, I would have smashed it, but it just kind of hung there. Like a limp plate of cold sausage.
Anyway, the school play was all very excellent, and us costumiers got to sit in the front row. I like to think I was channelling Coco Chanel in her Diaghilev days, and wore my (secret new) wool tweedy-esque Joseph jacket in sincere homage. I do not think that anyone noticed, though, because the children, dressed expertly as lambs/presents/shepherds/cats were so transfixing. I would post a photo, but we were warned not to put any photos up on social networking sites and other interwebby dangerzones.
You just have to imagine how cute and vacant-eyed they all were, dazed and confused and only four and five years old. Imagine the tinsel-shredding, the star hats sitting askew, the shepherds’ headdresses slipping over the eyes rendering them sightless and sleepy. I swear I saw Noah dribbling. But, importantly, both boys managed not to wee into their girls’ tights, which they wore with black long-sleeved t-shirts in order to facilitate becoming respective nativity play bit-players. They both loved their tights so much that they have been wearing them as their pyjamas after wearing them as their trousers for the whole weekend. Mark was a little uncomfortable with their adoption of what is essentially pantyhose, and so renamed them “Long Johns”. They all seem happy with that arrangement.
Right, well, it is time for bed. I have some serious Aveda-ing to deal with in the morning, as the Lampshade Hair has grown back. No amount of BaByLiss Big Hairing can fix it. Goodnight, and thank you.
The Harridan 
Oh, my boys would have been into the sausages and bread for sure! (Perhpas you needed Watties tomato sauce??) In fact, that is what we had for tea last night before going to our school prizegiving. Next time, let us know and I’ll send them along to eat your sausages!!
I would have eaten your sausages in bread. Sound delicious. Wish I could go Aveda-ing with you tomorrow. I have a bit of a lampshade hair issue going on myself – sadly, the salons here do not compare to Aveda with its scalp massages, fragrant hair products and choice of herbal teas. In this country the hairdressers charge more than Aveda but are quite keen on using those combs with the in-built thinning razors – you know the type that were often implicated in home hairdressing disasters in the 80s. Need I say more?
Your poor sausages! As a New Zealander should it not have been boiled hobbits or orcs or something?
I went to our school panto last night. Was dreading it cos there is no bar and I tend to need the dazzle of a bar to get me through the first half – but it was actually pretty good. I shouted, clapped and sang along at all the appropriate bits, much to my son’s embarrassment.
Re the thinning scissors – I had to request that my hairdresser stop razoring into my hair whilst we chatted because, although it looked fine when nice and straight in the hairdressers, when I washed my hair at home and it did it’s naturally curly thing, I looked like I’d been sticking my fingers in the sockets. Not a good look.
Have tons of Aveda fun!! 🙂 Ali x