Impractical Jokes by Charlie Pickering Read Free Book Online

by the rejection. In between affected pouts and world standard moping, he threw in some precision martyr work.
    â€˜Oh . . . I see . . . No, that’s fine, Ron. I hope you have a lovely evening . . . Don’t you worry about your old pal Richard . . . Your best friend . . . he’ll just stay home tonight . . . alone . . . reading a particularly lonely novel.’
    He may even have managed to squeeze out a solitary tear. All the while in his head he was thinking, ‘Oh you little beauty’.
    On the way home from the footy Richard and Ian hatched a plot. Ian was essential to Richard’s scheme and not merely because he had ordered two water pistols. You see, Ian was a builder and had done a bit of work on our kitchen and so he knew where the fuse box was.

    A Pamela Pickering dinner party is a sight to behold. My mum’s passion for food is matched only by her love of meticulous planning and her drive to be a good host.
    She would start with the guest list. Four was too few; twelve too many. Eight was ideal but ten was fine. She would carefully consider which friends and couples would complement others. More importantly, she vigilantly kept track of who had had a falling out with whom and could instantly calculate which combinations could turn septic within the first half hour. Her guests could always be confident that if they RSVP’d in the affirmative, they would be perfectly suited to the rest of the people there.
    Each meal had one simple responsibility: to be better than the last. And to achieve this, nothing was left to chance. If a dish was served at a Pamela Pickering dinner party, it was never for the first time. On a Saturday night when guests commented that their individual racks of lamb were both crispy and succulent, they had no idea that for the preceding week the Pickerings had eaten nothing but racks of lamb. On Monday night the racks had delivered on succulence, but the crumbs were soggy.
    On Tuesday we achieved crispiness of crumb, but the meat was dry. Wednesday had seen an experimental glaze that all had agreed was a mistake never to be spoken of again. On Thursday the crumb to rack ratios had been adjusted to achieve a result that was passable, and on Friday’s full dress rehearsal, the lamb was perfect. On the day, Suzie’s responsibility was to assist in setting the perfect table. She would polish silver, fold napkins and arrange plates with a care and attention to detail that I could never muster. Accordingly, my job was to not touch anything and put away my damned skateboard.
    My dad had three dinner party responsibilities: stay out of the kitchen, serve the perfect wine to match the food and, when people had overstayed their welcome, play Frank Sinatra really loudly and begin cleaning the dishes.
    The result of all of this preparation was a well-oiled machine that created a dinner party environment where you simply had to turn up to have the best evening you could recall.
    And this particular dinner party was no exception. Cocktails and canapés had seamlessly progressed to a broccoli and pumpkin soup that, it was agreed, all but defied science. The broccoli was contained in a green-coloured soup and the pumpkin in an altogether separate orange-coloured soup and they met exactly in the middle of the bowl along a shared border of cream. The result looked like a pie chart for an election in which the orange party and the green party had run a dead-heat for the Democratic Republic of Soup. And the pundits were unanimous, hung parliament or not, the outcome was delicious.
    Through entrée, the diners enjoyed a spirited debate about whether Elvis would have lived longer had he taken the lead role he was offered in Rebel Without a Cause instead of making Kissing Cousins and Girl Crazy . To wit: did the dreadful mismanagement of Colonel Tom Parker eventually kill Elvis Presley? As complicated as this sounds, it is a conversation my mother could have predicted. She matched