Living On Three Continents: Tough As Old Boots
Susan Siddeley maintains her sense of humour as she wrestles with the English and Spanish lanugages, and a particularly tough piece of meat.
It’s a challenge for us beginning writers to come up with different ways of saying things - to trawl experience for new metaphors and fresh similes - to prepare our chosen words and present (any) readers with a literary feast. In my experience, cooking up this banquet never does anything but confirm the absolute skill, wicked imagination and magic touch of those responsible for clichés tried and tested.
A piece of meat served at a barbecue lunch celebrating Chile’s Fiestas Patrias national holiday, along with the words,
“Pruebeselo es blandito” - “try it, it’s tender” is a perfect example.
The red, white and blue bunting strung along our patio fluttered in time to lively Cueca dance music as my well-capped incisors bit down on the overcooked chunk. It was immediately evident, and as inevitable as night following day, that the words “old boots” should spring to mind.
After half an hour, and with the help of toothpicks, dental floss, milk of magnesia and Roget’s Thesaurus, I still hadn’t dislodged the fibres, digested the membrane, or bettered that image.
I’m a seafloor feeder with the appetite of a donkey. I thrived on school dinners, where leather was frequently served under gravy and concrete was common in puddings. I survived student years on last week’s buns, shin beef and soup bones.
In the decades since, I’ve masticated all sorts of cooked flesh from suspiciously flat, pink fillet steak two days after local horses were reported stolen, to chickens chased round the garden before breakfast and dished up for lunch.
I’ve chewed my way round the old sow’s ribs and the mini bones of small mammals. I’ve nibbled on pigeons (alright - local quail), bought reluctantly from catapult-wielding children scraping together a few pesos for Christmas ... but all of the above were mincemeat compared to this bit.
Tough is tough, and “old boots” was all I could think of.
Maybe living part of the year in the Southern Hemisphere, where the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness comes in April, it’s the South that signifies freezing cold and the North which promises comforting warmth, has addled my brain.
Butter that’s been left out overnight in summer is ‘blandito’ (soft). Paraguayan beef filet is ‘blandito’ (tender). Babies’ bottoms and Shakespearean sonnets are also (respectively) soft and tender. But despite being cooked in the traditional manner - over slow-burning embers, patiently turned and re-turned by a Chilean cowboy with proper hat and boots on - that piece of meat proffered on a plate alongside a delicious tomato and onion salad, was tough as old boots.
