Lady Lunchalot

On Saturday night O and I found ourselves halfway between Melbourne and Horsham absolutely starving. We decided to stop for a counter meal at the next pub we saw, which happened to be the Wickliffe Hotel, affectionately known as “The Wickie”.

As we walked in, the four guys sitting around the bar stopped dead in their conversation and turned to stare at us as if we were standing there stark naked. But that seems to be pretty normal for a country pub when a stranger walks in. It made even more sense when we discovered that Wickliffe’s population reaches the staggering heights of 54 people. That would make pretty much everyone either a relative or a stranger.

A man wandered out of a back room with a proprietorial air, so O asked him for some dinner. He pointed to a sign which offered a parma, fish and chips, or lasagne. Now that I have ordered my wedding dress I’m trying to be a little more saintly with my appetite, but there weren’t really any Jenny Craig offerings in sight. In fact you could nickname these dishes See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil.

I was even too scared to ask for a Diet Coke and I would have been laughed out of the pub if I ordered a mineral water, so I settled for a pot of Carlton that I didn’t really want and decided that a parma would be the most readily pardonable sin to my hips.

The parma filled the empty spot, and the guys around the bar had forgotten about us by then. Their conversation was getting progressive more… colourful. One of them wandered by when we were chatting to the owner. As he joined in the conversation he leaned over me and asked, “You finished with those, luv?” and before I could answer had helped himself to the leftover chips on my plate! Worse than that, he ate half of one chip, and then put the uneaten half back down on O’s plate!

Cue banjo music….