The World’s Greatest Blog

That’s right, we met a tramp last night…

I’ll start this story at the end. Linda, Vicky and I ended up in St Kilda sipping coffee outside a cafe at about midnight last night. After a while, people started disappearing and the street became quieter. Soon a tramp wandered up to us and, though I’m not sure how he managed it, soon began a conversation with us.

He had a fair amount of admitedly drunken chat, and without any solicitation, we soon learned that he:

• is 50 years old
• is originally from Serbia
• drinks mostly from a brown paper bag (more of an observational deduction)
• hitch hiked round Australia twice (I surpressed the urge to ask what he missed the first time)
• has at some time or other worked in a kitchen

It is the last point that drew further stories from him and I’ll try to recount his parting story and do it the justice it deserves (though it will lose much for not having the Serbo-Australian slurry voice not to mention the rather wild hand signals and gravity defying sways of a man tucking into his 24th drink of the day):

His story goes like this:

“I worked in a kitchen, where we had a biiiiiiig machine that peeled potatos. I mean you poured potatos in the top - a lot of them mind, half a 30 kilo bag - and turned it on. It went around and round and round. Bmm Bmm Bmm Bmm. Noisy bastard it was. Any way it went round and round and round. Bmm Bmm Bmm Bmm.* And peeled all the potatos. After about half an hour, you’d open the bottom and a load of potatos would come out, all peeled.”

At this point Linda and Vicky were still totally quiet, and were looking both worried and confused (as they had been since he began chatting to us) and I myself was wondering exactly where, if anywhere, his story was going. But on he went:

“The only problem with this machine was that it didn’t get the eyes out of the potatos. You know the little eyes? Yeah. It didn’t get em out. So one day I goes to the chef and I says, ‘chef, you know that machine that peels the potatos? It doesn’t get the eyes out.’ The chef replied, ‘You should throw an onion in there with them.’ ‘Why?’ ‘They’ll cry their eyes out!’”

The tramp then began roaring - and I mean roaring - with laughter, at the top of his voice. Tears were literally streaming down his face. We all made a polite laugh, more through relief at the fact that he was telling a joke rather than a never ending story, and I remarked upon his laughter fit by telling him “it wasn’t that funny.” Which it wasn’t.

As we’d long since finished our coffees and teas, we wished him all the best, and left.

This chance encounter made my evening. Perhaps it was because he hadn’t asked for money. Perhaps his joke really was funny, on a sub-conscious level. Who knows?

Later, I’ll write about what we did before this highlight…

*The round and round Bmm Bmm Bmm stuff almost certainly went on much longer… around 5 minutes.