Red flag.
It was a bit of a ridiculous affair. It was England in August and the groom was wearing a three-piece velvet suit and cravat combo, there were 5 bridesmaids in suitably matching satin slip dresses and the equivalent number of overdressed and overheated groomsmen. The reception was in an old country house with heavy oak furniture smelling strongly of dust and the wedding was in the adjoining chapel.
They lived in what was Europe’s largest new housing estate full of Tudor-esq executive homes with two-car garages located on endless cul-de-sacs. She was a nanny and he was an aircraft engineer who obsessively ironed his jeans. They met in high school and they lived in a two-bed maisonette, but for this one day of their lives they were pretending to be from the ‘Where will you be summering?’ set and we all went along with it.
As with all formal weddings there was a big printed board at the entrance to the venue with the tables noted and a no doubt thoughtfully contrived list of who was sitting where. It was time to go in and eat our over-priced, under-hydrated chicken breast and a group of friends and I are looking up our tables.
Steve: ‘Oh, you’re sitting next to The Tomato Soup Guy.’
Me: ‘Who?’
Steve: ‘He only eats tomato soup.’
Me: ‘Don’t be so ridiculous!’
The starters come, it’s like a small bite sized thing and The Tomato Soup Guy declines. I’m now intrigued, this cannot be real, he is here with a girlfriend and surely no self-respecting woman would be with a man who subsists on lager and tomato soup alone?
The main comes and there it is; a bowl of unnaturally red tomato soup.
Of course, there was no way I could let this slide
Me: ‘Soooo...what’s with the soup then?’
Mr Tomato Soup Guy: ‘I choked on solids when I was young so I only eat tomato soup.’
I was speechless. It was beyond my comprehension that a grown man had only eaten tomato soup since childhood because he choked once. And it wasn’t even homemade soup, not even a tomato-based soup with additional vegetables or meat for good measure, it was tinned tomato soup factory made by Heinz. No variation, not a laksa, not a pea and ham, no chicken noodle; just Heinz tinned tomato. It was beyond anything I had ever come across; I was entirely lost for words that weren’t rude. How would a parent allow this to go on? Surely there was at least one self-respecting sensible person in his life that thought this situation needed to be nipped in the bud before it got out of hand and he was a grown-arse adult man sitting at a wedding eating soup out of a can?
Dessert came, chocolate mousse; he passed. Chocolate mousse? It’s the consistency of soup just slightly thicker. They feed it to people who have had tracheotomies or their tonsils out; it requires zero chewing.
It was too much; I’ve never got over it.
If as children we had refused to eat our dinner then we were sent to the laundry to eat on our own. This was the standard punishment, you will eat it on your own, on the cold floor of the cold laundry and you will not eat dessert.
This prescribed punishment for not finishing your dinner really highlighted the differences between each of us four siblings.
My older sister, she went to the laundry and she sat there in the cold and she ate her peas. Once.
Me, the second-born, I ended up in the laundry and I was not going to eat those damn peas. Being solutions oriented, I lined them up in the laundry sink plug hole and stabbed them down the drain with my knife.
My brother, the third born, he took his peas off the plate and flicked them underneath the washing machine. Not as fool-proof as the plug hole but still, not bad.
My little sister, she decided to open the back door and throw the whole contents of her plate out onto the back lawn. This still confuses me as to how she evaluated her options and came to the conclusion that throwing her entire dinner on the lawn was the best idea. The laundry was not that far from the dining room, of course we all heard the back door open and what did she actually think was going to happen to the food on the lawn? We didn’t have chickens, or a dog or even a cat and we lived in suburbia that is proudly fox free. Ridiculous.
Anyway.
