I know I haven’t posted anything for a week or quite possibly longer… or maybe even less… I couldn’t actually be 100% sure. But there is a valid and just reason for my absence; drinking. I’m not talking about performing the task we all need to complete to keep our body hydrated and there fore survive. No. I’m talking about drinking. The same drinking that has been the ruin of many a man through out the annuals of history. The same drinking that has caused great wars, helped create great pieces of art, caused a billion white trash children and inspired great self confidence for the ugly man for centuries gone by (and maybe even a bit of false vision for that girl he’s trying to chat up).

Just drinking. Drinking and barely hanging on to the love of my beautiful wife. Who I might add is still here, so maybe she still holds some kind of interest in what I do and there fore may still be reading this crap I write, so I figure this is pretty much an apology. All good? All good…

Now I shall need to digress a little just to make sure we’re all up to date on what’s going on. Which clearly means I need to check to make sure I’m up to date on what’s going on. It’s been a big week.

“AJ the duckman”

Anyone who has been following this blog for a while (although the role call of followers around here is not dissimilar to that at an aged care home. I’m not saying that you’re all old and senile and possibly share a love of crocheting blankets for orphaned bridge trolls in Slovakia, I’m just saying that followers come and go ‘round these parts… they come and go) would know of the man we called “AJ the duckman”.

“AJ the duckman” received small time notoriety on these pages through our late night drunken market cook ups… and a special night he spent with one stupid duck!

A year ago he packed up his ducks and left for Australia’s top end. Chasing the sun and a chance to possibly bag himself a real live barramundi. With nary a tear or a glance backwards he left us. Our weekly duck feasts became a thing of folk tales and mutterings of toothless old carnies. Just like that, the duckman was gone.

Until now.

The druids had foreseen the return of this man in the still beating heart of a 52 year old ox… that ox died for a reason that night, only to be reborn the next day as a small river trout named Geoffery. Life works in mysterious ways…

So the duckman has returned. For the last week or so he has been staying with us, slowly working away at the nerves of my good wife and tempting me into the perils of the white mans devil water. He has been supporting the local publican and quite possibly handed him enough cash to put his first born through a tertiary education (as long as it’s a back end, second rate sort of agricultural college that is. Not one of the top end universities). So we drank, but also we ate. A weeks worth of drunken cook ups later and here you go. Some were great, others just good, but all enjoyed with great company and many beverages, and then re-enjoyed through hundreds of blurry assed photos on our new camera!!

And that, my friends, is that… I think. I shall knock up a recipe or two in the not too distant future…