Eau de Chutney

Tuesday, August 26 08

A perfumery was sitting brewing on the dining table. Various jars and pots containing the young Bennets display of their versions of Estee Lauder’s Beyond Paradise and Beautiful surrounded Mr and Mrs Bennet as they attempted to eat a late tea. It was summer and they were munching through Chilli and mash. What else could you expect to eat on an August evening? It might as well be November. It certainly felt like it.
Having a “pink” of girls inevitably meant the pinks occasionally got up to girly things such as making perfume out of flower petals, soap and water. Mrs Bennet wasn’t sure washing-up liquid had the same desired effect, but the Miss Bennets decided otherwise.
“So what have you called your perfume then?” Mrs Bennet asked Miss Bennet Number Two as she insisted on eating her parents’ accompanying salad, despite having just eating a two-course meal at a local restaurant.
“I don’t know - because it’s not very good!" moaned a defiant Miss Bennet, looking accusingly at her mother.
"I'm sure it is. Why don't you think it's good?"
"Because it’s got chutney in it!” Miss Bennet shouted back.
Of course it was all Mrs Bennet’s fault for giving her an empty jar of caramelized red onion chutney in which to prepare her fragrance.
“You could always call it Chutney and be a bit different,” offered Mr Bennet, coming to his wife's rescue.
Mrs Bennet could see it being a hot-seller. “Chutney: full of fruit and spice and makes you smell of a ploughman’s lunch!”
She could therefore understand her daughter’s frustration. A perfume ruined by relish, was not a fragrance to be worn by young ladies.
Mrs Bennet wasn’t sure what the “use-by” date was on the Bennet perfumes, so decided she best leave them well alone for today. She’d had enough battles. An hour earlier she found herself wishing she was an owl and able to turn her head right round to see what the Miss Twin Bennets were up to behind her. Mrs Bennet had managed to capture the little madams on camera simultaneously putting on baseball caps on back-to-front and munching through their sisters’ wax crayons, but then had to stop herself from putting the digital camera into the microwave instead of the onions. What she should have been doing was preventing the potatoes boiling over, which they of course did. Then, because she was sorting the spuds out, she forgot to shut the stairgate to the kitchen so she soon had four arms clinging to her legs, pinning her to the oven, which was thankfully off at this point.
Leaving the Chutney perfume well alone was perhaps the best decision of the evening. With a bit of luck mold might appear on the container walls overnight forcing her children to decide they should throw it away. Like her poor mung beans, which after a week in a caravan, and despite their tadpole tails, had never quite managed to sprout to their full potential.