Happy Birthday, Andrew

I’m at the bach and today is the birthday of the 41-year-old chap next door. His name is Andrew Lamb. Don’t let him lie about his age.

If Andrew has turned 41 today, clearly last year was Andrew’s 40^th birthday and I have to say that it was celebrated with massive imagination and style when Andrew turned his St Heliers suburban home into a tropical island resort complete with faux-palm-fale and enough sand to make the Sahara feel inadequate. Andrew’s wife, Fiona, deserved something between a damehood and beatification for calmly allowing him to run with the idea in the first place. The thought of all that sand being traipsed through my house would really have done my head in.

Midway through that evening nobody was feeling any pain except me, the designated sober driver. The roles reversed the following morning when I was probably the only party attendee not to be in pain and it is at that stage one starts to feel just a little sanctimonious.

This year’s birthday sees Andrew celebrate at a proper beach with its very own native sand and last night, in a moment of CAN’T-STOP-VOLUNTEERING, I offered dessert as well as a dish of homegrown beans.

I awoke this morning with thoughts of my sister’s small but old and perfectly formed rhubarb plant and in the very next cascade of early-morning-brain-stew I remembered the most stunning and simple rhubarb puddy recipe which I’d found on the internet about 18 months ago.

I have it printed out but that precious piece of paper is in the drawer at home in Auckland. So I’ve spent the morning searching high and low all over the net and cannot find the recipe. To be honest I thought it was called rhubarb crisp but the problem with that is there are 98,700 rhubarb crisp recipes (no, really, thank YOU, Mr Google) to read and not one of them the correct one. This is how sad I am. I even remember what I was searching for when I came across the totally fabulous rhubarb recipe in the first place. I was searching for rhubarb cobbler.

I have now come to the end of my tether and Mr Scott will be arriving from Auckland very soon having not seen his mock-wife for a couple of days. Imagine his surprise when he discovers me, face down on the desk with QWERTY permanently impressed across my forehead from banging my head against the keyboard.

I have decided to make rhubarb cobbler  Rhubarb Rumble. And, Mr Google, having used the keywords “Rhubarb Crisp Recipe” in this piece I’ll be expecting to see your search results display 98,701 within 24 hours of this post.