Let me tell you about the penguin. I don’t mean the aquatic, flightless (and, let’s face it, just plain weird) bird who lives in the Antarctic. I mean the cheap and cheerful chocolate-covered biscuit bar filled with delicious trans fatty acid that graces many a child’s packed-lunch box. And, in particular, I mean The Penguin bar that sat atop a door frame in my house for many many years, gathering much dust and surprisingly little comment from visitors to the family abode.
I can’t actually recall how it all started, or how The Penguin came to be in its special resting place in the entrance hallway, on top of the door frame to what was variously, over the years, a dining room, Simon’s daughter’s bedroom, my daughter’s bedroom, the spare room, the computer room, and finally my son’s lodger’s room. I’m not even sure when it first found its way up there, but the sell-by date on the wrapper was early 2002, so it was some time in the preceding 9 months or so.
I vaguely recall the thought that it may have been ‘hidden’ there by one of my canny offspring, following some convoluted sibling dispute engendered by the inherent unfairness of a nine-pack in a two-teenager household. I also recall referring to it as ‘the run-out penguin’, in acknowledgement of the fact that it had been lodged there as a precaution against the day when someone would look in the cupboard for a delicious piece of calorie-enhancing niceness and find, to their utter horror, that Mother had Failed To Shop. I also recall mention of the fact that it may have been placed there as a test to see how often Mother Cleaned the House.
But why or how it came to be in its unusual location is unimportant. What matters is the significance it adopted in the years that followed.
The first Interesting Thing about The Penguin on the door frame was how invisible it seemed to be. Even those of us who had been involved in its placement often forgot about its existence. In all the time it was there, sitting brightly-coloured and incongruous against the plain painted wall behind it, only two visitors to the house noticed it and passed comment.
The first of these was PJ – arguably my son’s best and longest-standing friend. He was a regular visitor to our home, and I have seen him grow from the loud-and-troublesome-but-likeable seven-year old that he was when we first met him, into the loud-and-troublesome-but-likeable twenty-four year old father/burger-van owner/soon-to-be-law-graduate-with-a-criminal-record that he is now. He came on family holidays a couple of time with us when he was young, and I have vivid memories of hearing his voice above all others at the camp-site swimming pool (when we were in the nearby village!); of him kneeling on a slug in white jeans while crawling out of his tent in the morning; and of him crashing heavily into the fence at the bottom of an artificial ski slope because, although he had quickly learnt to move fast and confidently downhill whilst remaining upright, he hadn’t waited around to learn how to stop, before launching himself enthusiastically from the highest point. He is the sort of person that you definitely want to have inside your tent pissing out. He has a quick temper, a highly developed sense of justice and a knack for making sound (if sometimes extreme) judgements about people, even if he isn’t able to make sound judgements about his actions. He is a very good friend, and will do anything to help those that are in his tent. And the fact that he was one of only two people who ever noticed The Penguin is, I believe, a testament to something good and worthy in his character.
The second Noticer of The Penguin was my Wise Friend. I won’t mention her name for fear of embarrassing her with notoriety – she prefers to be an edge-of-attention sort of person. But the fact that one of the first things she said on her first ever visit to my house was “Why have you got a penguin on your door frame?” is symbolic of why she is my best friend. She sees stuff. She sees through stuff, and isn’t taken in by appearances. She is grounded and honest and she is what she is, and she says what she thinks. She has integrity. She does the Right Thing, even if nobody is watching. And these are the best sort of qualities you could hope to find in a friend. I know I can trust her, and I know I can trust her to tell me when I’m wrong (which is more often than I like to admit).
So, The Penguin’s first claim to significance is its value as an indicator of character, (a bit like the Moon Test, only much easier to administer. Remind me to tell you about the Moon Test sometime…. ).
The second thing that is interesting about this discordant digestive is the way in which it has developed increasing significance as time has passed. Through dint of a strange combination of humour, nostalgia and obsessive compulsion, it has become a sort of family tradition-cum-talisman. The longer it stayed where it was, the more impossible it became to do anything other than leave it there. Any practical suggestion that it must be mouldy and vile by now, and should be thrown away, would immediately invoke the responsive chant, “But you can’t…you just CAN’T!”
When we decorated the house prior to selling it, The Penguin was temporarily relocated to a different door frame, and reinstated in its original place of honour as soon as the paint had dried. When the house was sold, and my son moved out, The Penguin was carefully packed, transported, and duly installed in a new position above the door frame to his main living room, where it remained undisturbed and unnoticed by all but the venerable few to whom its holy significance was already known, until he moved house again, three weeks ago. And this is when I realised just how easily religious dogma is born.
In the course of the brain-addling process of the frantic-and-hectic packing-and-moving, and despite our many reminders to each other that, “we mustn’t forget The Penguin”, somehow, between us, we did. And on my last night in England, as I lay fitfully slumbering on a mattress on the floor of the only room in my son’s small new house with any floor space left, surrounded by partially unpacked boxes of his life, I awoke in a sweat of panic at the sudden realisation that we had LEFT THE PENGUIN BEHIND. For an hour or so, despite my already sleep-deprived state, I lay awake trying to reconstruct the packing activities of the previous day, in the vain hope that I would recall the moment at which I must have unmindfully taken The Penguin from its safe haven above the mayhem of relocation, and placed it in one of the many carrier-bags of miscellany that characterise the final phase of any house move.
But I simply couldn’t remember where I had put it, or even if I had put it anywhere at all. And the more I couldn’t remember moving it, the more convinced I became that I had left it behind. And suddenly I was seized with the terrible fear that if I did not retrieve The Penguin from the empty house and install it on a new door-frame altar in the new house Everything Would NOT BE OK. Even as my rational brain remonstrated with this insanity, and told me not to be so stupid – it was ONLY a mouldy old chocolate bar for heaven’s sake – my other brain, my reptilian brain, was urging me to get out of bed this very second, sneak out of the house with my son’s car keys, and drive across town in the deepest, darkest middle of the night to RESCUE THE HALLOWED PENGUIN OF PROTECTION.
I am proud to report that, despite the extraordinary heights to which my obsessive compulsions can sometimes rise, especially in the middle of the night when my underbrain is in overdrive, I resisted the obviously crazy impulse. I did however give voice to my compulsion the next day, and asked my daughter to ask her boyfriend to look for The Penguin when he did a last visit the house to collect some stuff we had left in the shed to take to the tip, before delivering the keys to the agent. I was pleased that she could bring herself to pass on such an odd request. And I was even more pleased that he did in fact retrieve the treasured item for us, despite snorting his incredulity when the bizarre mission was first explained to him. He certainly must believe that his future mother-in-law is bonkers. But then his own mother is a Roman Catholic, so I expect he is familiar with the concept of irrational belief in the power of symbolic foodstuffs to offer protection from evil.
But I am still not content. The Penguin is, as far as I am aware, still resting incognito in a plastic bag, somewhere in the home or car of my daughter’s boyfriend. I worry that he or his mother will inadvertently (or – god forbid – deliberately) throw it away, before I can raise the matter of its relocation with him. And now that my daughter is in the process of buying a house, and will hopefully soon be moving into her first-ever family-home-of-her-own with her own daughter and husband-to-be, I worry that a decision will need to be made not just about which door frame it should move to, but which house. It is a family heirloom, but to which heir should it loom?
Perhaps it should simply be broken into pieces, so that both my son and my daughter can keep a part of it, which they in turn can divide amongst their own children ad infinitum, until so many of our future progeny possess fragmentary remains that are by tradition alleged to be those of the True Penguin, that if all the parts were put together they would build a penguin bar as big as a ship.
Or perhaps the time has come for me to let go of The Penguin of Past Times and move on, safe in the knowledge that, since we quite clearly create our own universes, we can refashion them whenever and however we choose.
