Sunday, April 27, 2008

Burning the toast

Thinking about burning things (see my last post) takes me straight
back to childhood and my teens, when my father went through the
ritual of burning his toast most mornings, followed by the usual
scraping sounds, as he etched off the burnt bits with his bread
knife.

This was often accompanied by a few choice swear words, just as the
smoke started pouring out of the top of the grill / toaster.

It’s not as if he wasn’t intelligent. He was one of these kids who
was good at everything at school, went on to university (with the
help of a state scholarship, as did my mum), and then into teaching,
university lecturing, and eventually he got a chair in education.
He was very widely read and accumulated a vast number of books.

But coming back to the burnt toast, he often went round to see his
best friend, who went to the same school & who were at the same
university together. One evening at one of their rooms, my dad
burnt some of the toast they were sharing.

K. (his friend) picked up a burnt piece of toast, to put some butter
& jam on it.
T. (my dad) said, “Oh don’t eat that piece, I’ll have it.”
K.: “Oh, it’s alright, I’ll eat it.”
T.: "No, no. Give it to me.”

Whereupon K. said, “Well, you can go and burn another piece of toast
then!”

Mrs C reminded me about this story yesterday ... it was one of her
family's favourites.

K. was her dad.

2 Comments:

Blogger martin said...

Nice story, with a good punch line.
Funny how the sound of scraping toast is also one of the sounds of my childhood.

5:13 am  
Blogger justin said...

Hi Martin -- good to hear from you again. I imagine a lot of our ancestors did the same thing, like King Alfred burning the cakes.

10:09 pm  

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