Sunday.  Book club day again.  Women in boats carrying pies and casseroles.  Freezing weather.  A few hours of chit-chat on chick-lit and this-and-that and then it is again with the  over the seas and through the piercing wind trying to make it safely home before darkness and even-colder temperatures.  Gawd!  They sure know how to have a good time, eh?

This month Sally took her famous lemon meringue pie.  I confess to not being very happy about that.  But I am sure you know why.  If you can’t guess, I’ll make it more clear: she didn’t make two of them!  She did leave me a tuna fish sandwich, though.  I am not complaining.  I am definitely a well-cared-for old bastard but she can be a bit stingy with the baked treats now and again.

……….unless you are a dog or a bookclub member and then she is the source of all things good to eat.

Book club is hosted by Sal next month – weather permitting.   But, who are we kidding?  It would take a hurricane, sleet and minus-degree temperatures for cancellation to even be considered and, even then, half the women would still make it.  The main reason for that, of course, is that they all really like to gather, eat, drink and hob nob.  And they’ve been doing it for over 25 years.  It’s their thing.

The second reason is that book club is deemed all the more necessary when it is darkest winter.  They feel they need some ‘socializing’ even more.  And they are right.  Winter is the onset of potential ‘Bush Disorder’ (not to be confused with a similarly named but different problem south of the border)’ and, if it is a short winter, there are usually only a few sufferers.  But if it is long and harsh (as it threatens to be this year) then getting ‘out and about’ is one small way of dealing with it.  Every year someone is described as, or acts a little ‘bushed’ and the old, isolated bachelors suffer the most.  The women of book club seem to fare the best.  It is not a coincidence.

The third reason for good December turnouts is that Sally serves a rich and plentiful ‘spiked’ egg-nog that is to travel through Paulines perils for.  Naturally no one would travel tens of miles by sea in an open boat in winter merely to get a single cup of free egg nog.  Unless, of course, they had tasted it the pervious year in which case the temptation seed would have been well and truly planted.  But the real lure is that there is no chance of being limited to just one.  Sal goes big.  More than a few old gals have spent the entire day only steps from the punch bowl.  And the smiles are broad when they leave.

The bowl is always emptied.  Trust me.   It is the first thing I check when I am allowed back in.

Men are not alowed at bookclub.  I sit in the woodshed or go to my neighbour’s.  One year I just puttered about in the rain.  It’s pathetic.  Nevermind, in a few years I will be allowed to phone the elder abuse hotline and don’t think I won’t!

If they let me in to make the phone call.

In theory, anyway, we old men should be doing something like they do.  A regular poker night, a pub to go to, a sport to play together.  Or even a community project around which to coalesce.  Or something.  But we don’t.  Anyway, none of us are good cooks or are organized enough to get that part handled so we’d just sit around and get hungrier and hungrier til we left.  And we’d all be ticked as hell, too!  Doesn’t sound so great to me.

We have a pretty high proportion of prefer-to-be-alone males out here, anyway.  Independent, whacked-out,old-loners whose only real connection to one another is an inclination to conspiracy theories and perhaps a little substance abuse.  Any male bonding-like behavior is usually done in the summer when it is warm and sunny and we can hammer or saw over the other guys inane chatter.  We old codgers just aren’t as sociable as the women.  Nor do we like each other as much as they do.

And, even if we did like each other, most of the old guys are deaf!  So conversation is limited at best, non-existent most of the time and we don’t even get near one another in the winter.

Put another way: I have more conversation with more people in one half hour on a sunny summer Wednesday at the community dock café than I do during the entire winter months from mid-November to mid February.  Factor in the male-of-the-species component and there is an even a greater disparity.  Old guys just don’t ‘bunch up’.

It ain’t our thing.