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We’ve had a coconut sitting in our fruit bowl for a week. I thought it would be fun to buy a coconut, partly I think because I remember the thrill of having a coconut from my childhood. In those days coconuts were a rarity. You might win one at a fair or fete, if your aim was good and hard and you could dislodge one from its perch (and if it wasn’t stuck down), but they didn’t really stock them in supermarkets and families like ours didn’t get to go to the Caribbean on holiday.
But I recall my dad coming home with a coconut (and I can’t remember how he got it) and the fun of skewering it to release its milk and then trying to work out how to get inside it. I don’t recall how we managed it, just that it was difficult and funny watching my dad attempting it.
Tonight my wife was making a Thai soup and we realised we could use the coconut. Unlike my dad in the 70s, my wife had access to youtube and so successfully released the milk and then asked me for a hammer, so she could slowly crack it open. I couldn’t find my hammer, so we tried to do it with the handle of my archaeological trowel (it’s never been used for archaeology or anything else until now). That wasn’t good enough though. I said I thought it would be more efficient just to throw it on to our front path, but the internet saved me screwing this up by recommending that I put it in a plastic bag first.
And bang, first time, the coconut cracked in two. Still exciting to see even in my late 40s. With convenience food, and pre packaged coconut chunks and bottles of coconut water, I think getting your hands on an actual coconut and opening it up will always feel like a novelty, even if it’s relatively easy to get your hands on a coconut nowadays (this is not a Carry on film and no euphemism is intended - though is coconut a euphemism for a breast or a testicle or some hideous combination of both - a breasticle?).
I feel like I am truly from the past when I think about stuff like this. I remember my grandad having got his hand on a pomegranate and showing me how to eat the pieces with a pin. It was a thing of wonder and disbelief and so exotic. Nowadays pomegranate turns up in juices and sprinkled liberally on salads, even in places that are just pretending to be posh. Back then it felt like one had fallen off a boat load at the docks, bound for the table of the king and we’d some how snaffled it and got it home.
Anyway the rarity and scarcity creates childhood memories, but not this time for Phoebe who was in bed by the time I chucked a coconut in a plastic bag on to our paving stones and who is not yet au fait enough with the world to know that a coconut is an unusual fruit (or nut, or euphemism) in any case.
My wife and I watched Elf tonight, which bears repeated viewings and is funny and moving and I shed a few tears. Like all really good comedies you notice stuff on the fifth or sixth viewing that have never struck you before. Will Ferrell’s response to the intercom announcement in the department store is wonderful and neither of us had ever spotted the jack in the box call back in Santa’s sleigh before. The only misfire in the whole film are the weird and slightly rubbish animated animals and the snowman. Which I think the film makers thought would be a big hit, because the film ends with the snowman returning. The snowman is not that good fellas and no one was glad to see him at the end. If he’d been melted with a flame thrower then he might have been worth keeping.
Unusually I have ended up in a couple of end of year lists. RHLSTP is in the Guardian’s Top 50 Podcasts (though where is Me1 Vs Me2 Snooker - do these people have any idea?)
And Bruce Dessau has picked out Happy Now? as one of his 20 gigs of the year. It’s unusual, but gratifying to have my stand-up turn up in something like this. I think last time was the 2005 Daily Telegraph Worst Comedy Experience of the Year Award.
And it’s a fitting Christmas treat that the RHLSTP with the brilliant, funny and naughty Dawn French is up on video (also on iTunes and vimeo) and audio (also on iTunes). I think you will enjoy it
