Desolation: noun, the state of being for a humour blogger when life delivers nothing but unfunny moments.

Yeah, yeah, I can feel the sympathy from the blogosphere rising as you read this. Or maybe that’s just the smallest violins in the world playing a serenade.

Rather than feeling the love, I have been feeling the desolation that can only come from desperately trying to squeeze a droplet of humour out of the vignettes of life and coming up with a handful of pith. Oh, how I have wanted to jump right back in and pump out two or three humour blogs a week, taking the absurdities of life and rallying against them by showing them up for what they truly are. But I had nothing, not just nothing, but a whole truck load of nothing for about the last nine months.

The humour has been in me somewhere, just beyond reach. And like all good bouts of constipation,  the effort to squeeze a few funny words out is more than the product warranted. Hence the bar of publication never being reached.

However, today life delivered a truly absurd funny moment and I am bubbling over with mirth, retribution and have arrived in the zone. That warm and funny place where I can cobble some words together to form humorous thoughts and get them out there for the world to see.

And for what you are about to read, I thank my youngest, Quirky Kid, for the inspiration.

Today, a Sunday, started like any other. Italian Stallion cooked up a storm with his signature pancakes in the kitchen, the paperboy threw the paper into the rose bed, the kookaburras were laughing and Summer is here. But, little did I know what awaited in the kitchen.

For Sunday is also grocery shopping day, a task I don’t really mind. The degree of difficulty in carrying this out is only raised by having sons who eat like freight trains, but won’t tell you what they want to eat. It’s like the effort of having to think about what might satisfy their appetites at some point prior to them actually eating is herculean. So, it’s game of guess the inventory for this week and hope you don’t end up with 6 extra packets of smoked salmon because this is actually Save the Salmon week and nobody sent the memo.

My attempt at getting my guys to focus on their stomachs when they are not actually feeding consists of putting an empty shopping list on the fridge with a pen nearby, hoping they will be inspired enough to write something on the list. The results are not always predictable and often one is faced with nothing but empty blue line fever.

Today was not one of those days. For this is what greeted me on my fridge door.

If this is not the greatest gauntlet a kid can throw down to a parent, I don’t know that is. I feel positively inspired with the possibilities.

I can just hear the Queen check out chick now projecting over the supermarket microphone “sense of humour required on aisle 5!”. Or me going up to the front desk and asking where the senses of humour are located? “Why ma’am, two aisles down from the organic cucumber face masks between the low fat, non dairy icecream and the 4 ply luxury, strong as an ox, nothing is going to get through this sucker, toilet rolls”.

Little does Quirky Kid now that he has sparked my funny gland to life. Little does he also know that I have bought him a sense of humour survival pack comprised of all the things that playfully tick him off. The $2 shop has rich pickings in these sorts of things from a giant glass light bulb, because how else do you present a bright idea? to a t-shirt which has “grumpy” of the Snow White fame on it, because that’s how he usually starts each day.

Good mothers hug their sons and comfort them. Great mothers engage in humour warfare and throw down there own gauntlets for said sons to retrieve.

One last thing, the title to this blog has also been inspired by Quirky Kid who has taken up hospitality as a final year subject. This requires him to engage in  70 hours of cooking, none of which is of course done at home. I’m still waiting for him to expend some hours in my kitchen, but alas the only hours he spends in there produce mess for me. In keeping with the grocery theme, I asked Quirky why he chose hospitality, it being quite out of character for him to choose a subject that may require some physical effort and have a practical bent.  Quirky is usually into all things science with a bit of geography thrown in. His response, accompanied by the eye role: “Mum, cooking is just science with food.”

Sounds like a great blog title to me!