JOHN MARTIN'S TALES

This is a column I wrote years ago — and used in one of my early eBooks, called Son, give me back my trousers.

WOULD SOMEBODY please remind me to take my trousers out of the freezer?

I put them there the other night, amid the peas, carrots and meat, because I sat on some bubblegum at a fast food restaurant.

I recall hearing a long time ago that the best way to scrape bubblegum off fabric was to freeze it first.

But then, my memory sometimes deceives me.

Perhaps I was supposed to put my trousers in a hot oven for 32 minutes?

“How did you sit on bubblegum?” my wife Katherine asked.

“It was on the seat,” I said, less than happy. In fact, I was livid.

That particular fast food place is rapidly becoming my least favourite place to go.

The main reason for going there is that it is convenient. My son Jack, 6, goes to Auskick training nearby and seems to work up a mighty appetite for the toys on offer with children’s meals there.

He is not alone. He is friends with three young brothers, Thomas, Oliver and James, aged four to seven, who also go to Auskick, and they have a baby brother, Matthew, who is too young for footy but old enough for fast food.

The first time we — both sets of parents and all the boys — went there coincided with visits there by lots of other children. And before we knew it just about every child in the restaurant decided to go to the toilet.

“What’s going on?” I thought as I headed to the bathroom to investigate.

What I found was an impromptu kids party. Every tap was running, there was much gleeful screaming and one little girl, perhaps three, and obviously not permitted room at a sink, was running her fingers playfully through the pale yellow puddle in the white porcelain urinal.

That put me off my hamburger — even more so when I saw her wiping her hands dry on the front of her outfit.

The next time I went to that fast food place, I found myself sandwiched in by a tableload of little boys. Matthew, the baby, was in a highchair at the other end of the table and when he decided to raise his thickshake above his head and tip it all over himself, I could see what was about to happen but, being hemmed in, there was nothing at all I could do about it.

Then there was the other night.

I have to be honest, it might not have been bubblegum. It might have been chewing gum. The scientific test is not back.

All I know now is that it was on the seat that I sat on.

Maybe some kid put it there for safe keeping while they ate their burger. Maybe they fully planned to come back to it, but forgot. It’s their loss and my, er, loss too.

I was blissfully unaware of the gum’s presence until I tried to get up to leave and detected quite a deal of elastic resistance from the seat.

The upshot was that I spent the rest of the night with a shopping bag stuck to my bum so I would not ruin any upholstery.

It would not have been so embarrassing if we planned to go straight home.

Our car has twin airbags and one more on my backside would not have looked too out of place had a curious policeman stopped us.

But we went back to the boys’ parents’ house for the adults to eat real food and I felt really, really, really silly moving from lounge chair to dining chair with my new plastic appendage.

I was ever so glad to get home to put my trousers in the freezer.

But now I have another problem.

How will I know when they are ready?

I have an appalling record with taking things out of the freezer.

I have been known to take what I thought was meat out of the freezer only to find when it defrosted it was actually a bunch of rhubarb sticks.

I once grabbed the wrong mince from the freezer and made up for the family a batch of spaghetti sauce out of kangaroo mince we had brought from a pet food-only butchery.

What if I get mixed up one day and we end up eating my pants?