Sunday Sunshine

The people I know are normal. No really. They are.

Take this weekend just past, for instance. As Melbourne warms up, the urge to get out in the sunshine becomes stronger and stronger, so a group of my friends decided to do just that.

Champagne Sundays are fast becoming a bit of a tradition. As soon as the weather turns nice we’ll hit the beach or a local park with a list of necessary ingredients. Namely: Champagne, sausages and a travel barbeque. From that point on the world is our oyster.

I arrived fashionably late, as usual. Not only did I hit the road late but I neglected to account for the rush of traffic headed beachward for the day. Never mind, timing is everything as they say and just as things started to turn good I was ready and waiting to jump in on the action.

Amongst the attendees was a pair of poofters from the periphery of the social spectrum. A couple of guys who are great fun to watch from a distance, but tedious to deal with in an extended stretch.

One has a voice like the hyenas out of The Lion King and a screeching laugh that can be heard seven suburbs away. His partner in crime looks for all the world like a mannequin coated in wet lacquer, resplendent in fire engine red finger nails with a trout pout to put Pete Burns to shame.

The pair do so love a drink, and with a dozen bottles of champagne on hand, that was exactly what they did. It didn’t take long for the booze and summer sunshine to take hold and the boys got very merry very, very quickly.

Before too long Trout Pout had the Hyena pinned to the ground in an awkward wrestling hold, with his chest flat to the ground, a knee in his back and his head turned through 180 degrees, yanked by the hair, while a bottle of champers was unceremoniously tipped down his neck.

From that point it was game on. The Hyena recovered quickly and without pausing emptied the contents of his wine glass all over Trout Pout. Thankfully it was only a plastic cup, as stage two involved burying the champagne flute into Trout Pout’s face.

No drink was safe from that point on as the Breaker Brothers began their merry jig of alternately pouring glass after glass of booze down their throats, or over each other – or anyone else who happened to be in the vicinity.

Every so often they’d take a little breather and Trout Pout would soak a slice of bread in champagne to give to a swan, while the Hyena tried to stuff as many cheese slices and strawberries into Trout Pout’s clothing without him noticing.

While this was going on the barbeque was sizzling away with a batch of rissoles. On standby, a pack of sausages, ready to complete our lunch. Or they would have been, had the terrible twosome not gotten their hands on them first.

I’m all for a good food fight. Hell there’s nothing more awesome when the mood is right, however when 90 percent of the people there are sober, drenched in someone else’s spilt grog and planning on heading out that evening it becomes slightly less funny.

Well, actually it would have been slightly less funny, except I managed to avoid the chunks of sausage mince being hurled from one end of the park to the other. I swear, there’s comedy, then there’s two screaming queens wrestling in the dirt, trying to slap each other with a raw snag.

For shits and giggles nothing else comes close. They even pulled the classic “Wait. WAIT… I’ve got something in my EEEEYE!” routine, before wailing on each other twice as hard with a fresh string of chipolatas. Comedy Gold, I kid you not!

Eventually we did manage to leave the park, tidied up our mess, picked up as many empty sausage casings as we could find and headed to The Laird Hotel while the perilous pair picked chunks of sausage mince out of their ears, hair, bum cracks and anywhere else it may have ended up.

And that my friends, is poetry in motion.