Bring Back The Luncheon

We wound back the clock at our place this long weekend; luncheon and tomato sauce sandwiches for lunch. Tidy.

Remember how luncheon used to be staple in our diets? Mum would come back from shopping with a pile of luncheon the size of a small child, all of which cost her about 30 cents. For you and I that meant luncheon, cheese slice and tomato sauce roly-polies all week, the breakfast, lunch and dinner of champions.

Then two things happened that almost irreversibly struck luncheon off the shopping list of mothers across the land. First, some ponce called Tarquin had an allergic reaction, allegedly to a slice of luncheon that he was given by the butcher who gave every kid a free slice of luncheon in the supermarket. We loved it because it was luncheon and that stuff was the shit. Our mothers loved it because it keep us quiet for 10 minutes.

But then Tarquin went and ruined it for everybody by having some sort of spew in the supermarket that was instantly attributed to the last thing he ate; free luncheon. To this day nobody knows if it really was the luncheon or something else that caused it, like perhaps the anti-bacterial soap that his mum doused him in after playing with the coloured boys up the street.

The story also caught the attention of the kind of people who long to make a fuss out of absolutely nothing and thus the seeds of a mass panic were sown in the guise of 'Letters to the Editor' and calls to talk back radio, all purporting to have experienced the holocaust that is free luncheon. Why they had never mentioned it before was never explained and thanks to their efforts a nation of precious mothers turned their fear from that of the coloured boys up the street to free luncheon in supermarkets, all the while stuffing Tarquin and Sebastian full of artificially coloured cereals, cordials and ridiculous things like chicken nuggets.

Those very same shit stirrers got their knickers in a twist the other week about silly boys doing silly things in front of swastikas and alike at the Auckland Museum and true to form, did they kick up a needless waste of all our time about that too. Suddenly several luncheon-free-diet boys were 'Public Enemy Number One' and only the butchers who used to give out free luncheon really knew how they felt.

It all reminded me of this one time as a child, whilst being dragged along to yet another dead set boring craft fair (the likes of which your parents always made you go to) I came across a guy peddling military memorabilia and man, did he have some good shit. Hanging high in the corner was a genuine Hitler Youth outfit and it was the business. I didn't dare ask where it came from because quite frankly he had a thick European accent and was roughly the age of an escaped-from-justice war criminal, but my god did I want it. Why? because it was cooler than free luncheon, that's why.

Thankfully due to the price (or because they never bought me anything I actually ever wanted anyway) my parents had the good sense not to indulge me that day and I was not given the chance to make a mistake that only a naive child would make; like bowing down in front of a banner bearing the swastika or in my case, strutting around a predominantly brown neighbourhood in a Hitler Youth costume.

Of course the other stink thank that heralded the end of free luncheon was that at some point we started to get a bit hoighty toighty about what we ate and suddenly common, we've been eating the stuff for ages luncheon was not quite good enough.

Instead Mum's started buying things like shaved champagne ham which had to be posh because it has booze in the title, but went shit with tomato sauce. That then lead to the cured meats, the peppered pastrami and these days, prosciutto which is ham you silly bitch, only at three times the price.

So bring back giving out the free luncheon I say, because life was never the same the day after they stopped.