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Authors: Richard Glover
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cause intellectual impairment among laboratory rats.
I break the news to Jocasta and she is not happy. ‘I don’t know why you bought a metal teapot in the first place. Didn’t you realise there might be lead in it? Your son will now almost certainly fail his final exams and it will be all your fault.’
She suggests I go and sit on the naughty chair as payment for my crimes. Jocasta has been watching the TV show Supernanny and wants to try out some of the tips. According to the Supernanny, offenders should be sentencedto the naughty chair for a period of minutes equal to their age in years—five minutes if you are five years old, six minutes if you are six.
This is fine advice, except when the miscreant is, like me, forty-six. I tell Jocasta I think three-quarters of an hour is too long, but she is adamant.
I spend some time on the naughty chair contemplating my crime. I realise I feel quite upbeat. Everyone else in society has an excuse for their failings—excuses such as poverty, racial intolerance and ingrained prejudice towards the left-handed. Finally I have mine. Oh, bliss. I’ve been poisoned by my teapot. Suddenly, it’s clear—the bad temper, the over-reliance on alcohol, the oversensitivity to criticism—it’s all the fault of the teapot.
Jocasta sits at the kitchen table, glumly dunking a teabag. ‘You’re like the Dr Crippen of the inner west,’ she says.
I decide to award myself remission of sentence for good behaviour. I arise from the naughty chair, pour a glass of wine to celebrate my release and sink into the couch. By now, Jocasta has told the children about the teapot and Batboy has decided he may as well stop studying for his end-of-school exams. ‘I’d wondered why I couldn’t understand a word of Shakespeare,’ he says resignedly, turning his attention to the TV. ‘And why those Russian names in World War II were so hard to remember. If it wasn’t for that teapot, I wouldn’t be in this situation. The whole thing is hopeless.’
He busies himself drinking water in an effort, he says, ‘to leach the lead out of my system’.
I try to work out just how much lead we’ve ingested and, therefore, how much the teapot is to blame for our variousshortcomings. I do the numbers—as best I can considering I’m a man suffering severe mental damage. Three cups a day, for twenty years, with two extra cups on both Saturday and Sunday, comes to a grand total of, give me a minute…well, a lot. If I had not been systemically poisoned by my own teapot I may be able to offer a firmer figure.
I have a better idea: I will work backwards from all the disappointments I’ve suffered. It’s probably the most accurate way to get a good fix on just how much lead I’ve consumed. Why, for example, have my books never sold as well as those of Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling? Why am I unable to win a single game of squash, even if I hand-pick the most asthmatic, lard-arsed of opponents?
And why am I yet to win a significant literary prize? Or, for that matter, a prize for medicine, science or peace?
That teapot has a lot to answer for.
Once in a mood like this, you start to go through your whole life, blow by disastrous body blow. I remember when I first left school, I tried to get a job at the bottom rung of the television industry. My idea was to start as a coffee boy and then rise to become the director of TV soap operas. The coffee boy job, however, eluded me. I had aimed low, and missed.
Fair enough, this happened before I bought the teapot; I have to accept that the teapot may not be to blame for all life’s disappointments. But if not the teapot, it must be something else. There are those aluminium frypans we used to use, and which are still stuck up the back of the cupboard. The fibro garage we had at home when I was growing up. The flightpath overhead. The fluoride in the water supply…
I wonder about the laboratory rats—the source of the original case against the teapot. How, exactly,
I break the news to Jocasta and she is not happy. ‘I don’t know why you bought a metal teapot in the first place. Didn’t you realise there might be lead in it? Your son will now almost certainly fail his final exams and it will be all your fault.’
She suggests I go and sit on the naughty chair as payment for my crimes. Jocasta has been watching the TV show Supernanny and wants to try out some of the tips. According to the Supernanny, offenders should be sentencedto the naughty chair for a period of minutes equal to their age in years—five minutes if you are five years old, six minutes if you are six.
This is fine advice, except when the miscreant is, like me, forty-six. I tell Jocasta I think three-quarters of an hour is too long, but she is adamant.
I spend some time on the naughty chair contemplating my crime. I realise I feel quite upbeat. Everyone else in society has an excuse for their failings—excuses such as poverty, racial intolerance and ingrained prejudice towards the left-handed. Finally I have mine. Oh, bliss. I’ve been poisoned by my teapot. Suddenly, it’s clear—the bad temper, the over-reliance on alcohol, the oversensitivity to criticism—it’s all the fault of the teapot.
Jocasta sits at the kitchen table, glumly dunking a teabag. ‘You’re like the Dr Crippen of the inner west,’ she says.
I decide to award myself remission of sentence for good behaviour. I arise from the naughty chair, pour a glass of wine to celebrate my release and sink into the couch. By now, Jocasta has told the children about the teapot and Batboy has decided he may as well stop studying for his end-of-school exams. ‘I’d wondered why I couldn’t understand a word of Shakespeare,’ he says resignedly, turning his attention to the TV. ‘And why those Russian names in World War II were so hard to remember. If it wasn’t for that teapot, I wouldn’t be in this situation. The whole thing is hopeless.’
He busies himself drinking water in an effort, he says, ‘to leach the lead out of my system’.
I try to work out just how much lead we’ve ingested and, therefore, how much the teapot is to blame for our variousshortcomings. I do the numbers—as best I can considering I’m a man suffering severe mental damage. Three cups a day, for twenty years, with two extra cups on both Saturday and Sunday, comes to a grand total of, give me a minute…well, a lot. If I had not been systemically poisoned by my own teapot I may be able to offer a firmer figure.
I have a better idea: I will work backwards from all the disappointments I’ve suffered. It’s probably the most accurate way to get a good fix on just how much lead I’ve consumed. Why, for example, have my books never sold as well as those of Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling? Why am I unable to win a single game of squash, even if I hand-pick the most asthmatic, lard-arsed of opponents?
And why am I yet to win a significant literary prize? Or, for that matter, a prize for medicine, science or peace?
That teapot has a lot to answer for.
Once in a mood like this, you start to go through your whole life, blow by disastrous body blow. I remember when I first left school, I tried to get a job at the bottom rung of the television industry. My idea was to start as a coffee boy and then rise to become the director of TV soap operas. The coffee boy job, however, eluded me. I had aimed low, and missed.
Fair enough, this happened before I bought the teapot; I have to accept that the teapot may not be to blame for all life’s disappointments. But if not the teapot, it must be something else. There are those aluminium frypans we used to use, and which are still stuck up the back of the cupboard. The fibro garage we had at home when I was growing up. The flightpath overhead. The fluoride in the water supply…
I wonder about the laboratory rats—the source of the original case against the teapot. How, exactly,
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