Monday 17 October 2011

Tarantino Housewarming

Where I live at least, landlords who rent their properties via estate agents usually present their houses in a pretty good condition, often newly decorated and with new, or steam cleaned carpets. The property I moved into in 2000 was no exception, and although it was small, it was very well presented with gleaming (if magnolia can be gleaming??) walls and perfectly fresh minty green carpets throughout.
We had a few friends round, all offering housewarming presents of varying degrees of alcohol content- brandy, vodka, beer and wine. The wine was the problem, for I realised at 10pm that night when presented with another bottle of wine that there was no corkscrew in the house- not packed away in a box or at the bottom of a disorganised cutlery tray- as a 90's ladette I was a confirmed beer drinker, and had therefore never had need for one. The late 90s for me were spent drinking men under the table, swigging beer out of bottles and pretending to smoke. The idea of a corkscrew had never entered my head until that Saturday night, before the days of screw cap wine and 24 hour supermarkets.
My friend Sarah, who had brought the wine with her, was obviously more sophisticated than me and very keen to get into the first bottle of rioja. Without the luxury of a corkscrew, and never one to be beaten, I decided there must be another way to crack it open so collected a selection of implements- pen knife, meat  skewer, kitchen knife, scissors- and lay them out on the side of the sofa like a surgeon about to conduct a very haphazzard and probably illegal operation. Why I thought the living room was a more sensible place than the kitchen is unknown, but I did, and determinedly began poking and prodding in an attempt to remove the cork. The pen knife was too small, the kitchen knife nearly resulted in the loss of my leg and the scissors were too fiddly (this was turning into an alcoholic version of Goldilocks) so I moved on to the meat skewer. By this time the cork was obviously starting to feel the effects of the poking, and the final stab was one step too far.

A slightly less gruesome version of what my front room looked like   

Before I could poke any further, the cork gave in and the wine exploded, with me sitting on the sofa covered in red wine from head to toe. It was all over my hair, my clothes, the sofa, and the wall. The newly painted magnolia wall. After the initial shock, then hysterical laughter of everyone else, I got up to see the wall and ceiling looked like a scene from a Tarantino film- blood red wine, flecked with lumps of brain matter-esque cork was splattered across the previously immaculate surfaces, with a clear magnolia stencil of the woman who had been sitting there minutes before. That scene in Pulp Fiction where Marvin's head gets blown off in the back of the car? This was it, but with wine instead of blood. As it turns out, red wine is just as difficult to remove from paint as blood, and several paint jobs later it was still visible when the light was on. We never did get our deposit back on that place.

 

1 comment:

  1. I am presenting Sadie Bakewell with the Liebster Blog Award http://welshwalesmam.blogspot.com/2011/11/liebster-blog-award.html

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