The Forty Minute Farewell. This topic is such a monstrous cliche, more overdone than a carbonised barbecue sausage, that it is really pointless to add my thoughts.
At first, it seemed Google was in total agreement. I typed in 40 Minute Farewell and in just over 12 seconds, the search engine found 143 million results. But closer inspection revealed it was the word Farewell that got the Google engines whirring.
The Forty Minute Farewell does not exist. And yet in our house, it is set in stone. No prestigious dinner party ends without The Forty Minute Farewell playing out, first in the lounge, and then slowly through doors and down halls until it reaches its loudest and most intellectually vigorous climax at the open front door, howling winds and icy sleet lashing us to within an inch of our lives. Except, of course, the visitors are all snugly clothed with cover to the top of their heads, and we are virtually buck naked, teeth chattering and spines shivering, praying to the great behavioural director in the sky that he finish this thing here and now before something is said very loudly, using swear wordsI have talked to many people these past few weeks about The Forty Minute Farewell. It does seem to be essentially a New Zealand thing.
Friends in England and America screwed their brains sideways trying to understand what I was on about.
But New Zealanders now domiciled over there knew full well about this maddening thing. They remembered it well.
Clearly, this is a national characteristic all Kiwi social historians have somehow forgotten to mention in their books on the sheep and pavlova paradise we live in. So, what drives the New Zealand brain, so under-used and incorrectly aimed during dinner, to suddenly come alive and begin serious conversation with existential thought patterns just when it's time to go home, when the hosts are desperate to go to bed, and, most strangely, when the decision has already been made to LEAVE?
Hien?
How inadequate or badly constructed are we that we have to pace our evenings in this way?
Let me take you through an archetypal Forty Minute Farewell.
This happened last month at our house, as we acted as magnificent hosts for an old friend now living in Japan. We garnished the line-up with another member of our legendary Otago Boys' High School year, who owns quite a few guitars, his wife and my sister, who gave me a kidney and saved my life. A natty bunch, you might say, normally capable surely of saying it's time to go home and going home seconds later.
Not so.
Real estate came first, as it invariably does, and after a rational discussion on why we have guttering on our houses, the cause of millions of dollars of repairs when rain water is well capable of running down into the garden like it does from the sky, things moved to the absurdity of having to discard shoes at open homes for a house that has clearly had shoes on in it for centuries, which naturally led to my show-stopping tale of putting on someone else's shoes at an open home in Tainui recently, when I went out to inspect the back garden, returning to see a furious fellow barring my way, holding out a pair of shoes. Mine.
People fell over laughing at that one, as they always do. In Japan, countered our old friend, they have special slippers for the toilet. Bwahahahahah!You see what keeps us stranded in Arctic temperatures when everyone just wants to go to bed?
The thing that takes 40 minutes when time to go should mean Time To Go?
It's summer now, I may teeth-grind my way through a few more Forty Minute Farewells.
But I'm not having another winter of unending whooshing cold air at midnight through an open door with people waxing on witlessly about toilet slippers. The first time someone says time to go, I will say righto, and go straight to bed.
- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
