… or top tips on how to really break the tension
By Angus Richard
We were having lunch with some very dear friends. The ‘light of my darkness’ had spent hours preparing a glorious menu and had conjured up a spread with enough on the table to feed the entire Spanish army for the duration of a small campaign. Our guests, now mostly retired, had arrived. The wine was flowing, and we settled around the burgeoning table on our veranda to a glorious spring day.
My old mate Tom had made the journey from Western Queensland. Tom’s father was a potato farmer and Tom followed him onto the land. Tom had a wonderful turn of phrase. His words always seemed to be considered and well chosen. Tom was generous with his time. When landscaping a previous home Tom came over to help. I was enjoying with Tom a somewhat lengthy morning tea break. Tom, always a goer, decided we had sat around for long enough and we should get into it again. He climbed to his feet and fired one of his dad’s favorite admonishments: “Come on mate. This won’t buy the child a frock!” Tom was indeed a man of few words but when uttered, so full of country charm and wisdom.
The luncheon was progressing famously. The bubbly flowed with laughter and good cheer. All the old stories were re-told of the fun and good times we had enjoyed together. Then suddenly and with great violence, the diminutive Beryl, all twinset and pearls, broke wind! This was no discrete ‘cough in your rompers’! This was the full philharmonic orchestral event of eyewatering duration!
The conversation and chatter around the table came to a halt with the abruptness of a butterfly striking a windscreen. We were all suddenly immobile, frozen in time and speechless. Every eye turned to the aghast and explosive Beryl. How could this gentle soul have produced something of such magnitude and violence? She was of course mortified. Tears were welling in her eyes, and she began to push her chair back to rush from the gathering in her overwhelming embarrassment.
Then Tom spoke up in his laconic Western Queensland drawl:
“Heavens Beryl” he exclaimed “If you had given that a bit more choke it would have bloody started!”
The spell was broken. The table, including Beryl, simply collapsed in gales of laughter. The embarrassment evaporated, conversation roared back, the wine flowed, and the world moved on, as did the luncheon party, only to reluctantly disperse in the early evening with copious farewells of “we must do this again.” All of which just goes to show that in life, being brave enough to speak up with a dash of humor at a tense moment can turn a looming disaster into a moment of laughter!
