Kalgoorlie Miner (19): Kebabs

I was struggling for a column topic today (that is Wednesday) so I stepped into my pool, expelled the air from my lungs and resolved to lie face down on the bottom until I came up with something acceptable. I hoped that the silence, the zero gravity sensation and the threat of imminent death would get my creative juices flowing - and said juices did flow, my dear reader.

As I lay prone in what was potentially my watery grave, I began thinking about kebabs - not about how delicious they are, not about their potential for carrying deadly bacteria, but about the role they have played as a binding thread through the ragged quilt that is my life thus far.

Weightlessly hovering in my liquid environs, I remembered my first taste (literally) of kebabs - a job at the now-defunct Kebab Company Scarborough, next door to the Stamford Arms. I thought of the 6.00 pm to 2.30 am weekend shifts that I worked for $8 an hour; of the summer twilights spent with a pair of open burners slow-roasting my back and the setting sun in my face; of the drops of sweat that would fall into kebabs from the tip of my nose, remarkably unnoticed.

My fists mutely pounded the fibreglass as I recalled the abusive English skinheads that I tolerated without a whimper; the musclemen who would angrily insist that the yolks be removed from their eggs; the arrogant South Africans who thrived on belittling me and who's behaviour was an order of magnitude more offensive than that of any slobbering drunkard.

I grimaced an aquatic grimace as I relived the paralysis that gripped me when confronted by groups of giggling beach babes. Halfway through an involuntary bumbling parody of my kebab making routine, one of my Scarborough Football Club mates would inevitably burst in, make a crude joke about hot meat, then strut back out with the chicks in tow - to pash behind the Surf Club I supposed.

Yes, I cooly reflected from the depths, the kebab shop taught me many of life's great lessons - it made me a Labour man, it taught me to stick up for myself, and it showed me that when girls talk of men in uniforms, they speak not of a 17 year-old in a hommus-stained polo shirt.

As I relaxed and entered the "acceptance" stage of drowning, other major kebab-related life events flashed before my eyes.

My first proper girlfriend and I broke up while watching "He Died with a Felafel in his Hand", a movie which I enjoyed immensely nonetheless. I too would like to die with a felafel (my favourite kebab) in my hand... as I ride my bicycle through an electrical storm (refer to column 17).

I was eating an authentic Greek kebab as I watched Sally Robbins famously collapse and deny my sister Sarah a medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics - yes my actual certified sister was rowing in the same crew, and no she neither slapped Sally, nor smote her with an oar. As delectable as that particular kebab was, I felt obliged to spit it out in disgust.

My decision to quit Croesus Mining Norseman exploration crystallised after the 2005 local race day, while staggering around the small town in search of a kebab shop that I knew didn't exist. I had to settle for stale potato gems and a microwaved chicken roll from Caltex - that was the last straw.

It was after this thought about Norseman’s kebablessness that I, your wrinkly narrator, emerged from the pool content with my musings on the matter and ready to put pen to paper, or fingers to little buttons, as it were - a few brain cells poorer yes, but far more deeply in touch with my inner kebab.

I leave you this day with a suggestion: be nice to the people at Acropolis - friendly people get bigger kebabs.