I'm Just Going Outside, While You Prepare the Sauce

My tech support contacted me out of the blue this morning which surprised me as I thought they had fallen off the face of the earth.

"Guys, where the hell have you been?  I haven't heard from you for weeks."

"Sorry, we've been busy with the APEC summit in Port Moresby," they explained.

"Oh, are you doing tech support for that as well?"

"No, we have a Maserati dealership."

As it turned out my tech support had contacted me due to some disturbing internet search terms emanating from my Tasmanian correspondent's computer.  They felt I might like to have a word.

"Why don't you guys do something?"

"Sure; we can launch a drone strike, orchestrate an anthrax outbreak or unleash killer squid on the coastal cities.  Which would you prefer?"

"All right, I'll give her a call."

I hastily contacted my correspondent and tried to think of a delicate way of broaching the reason for my call.

"I've been talking to my kids about cannibalism," she announced which cleared the air nicely.

"Understandable," I agreed, "if they're going to grow up in Tasmania they deserve to know the worst."

But apparently she wasn't referring to the grim realities of daily life in Australia's most remote and desperate province (there would be a reality show but they ate each other).  And it rapidly became clear that she hadn't been talking to her children about cannibalism so much as one of her children (Grace) had been talking about it to her.  With a rather concerning amount of enthusiasm.

In her role as a semi responsible parent my correspondent had been telling her wide eyed offspring the tale of Scott of the Antarctic's doomed expedition to the South Pole (nothing like mass death and ghastly weather to cheer the kiddies up).  She made much of Colonel Oates heroic self sacrifice (which achieved absolutely nothing) and his "I'm just going outside and may be some time" moment.  Grace immediately leapt to the conclusion that they cannibalised him.

"No, no," protested my correspondent.  "He was slowing them down and they were running out of food."
"So they ate him," repeated the precocious eight year old. 

Nothing my correspondent did or said could dissuade Grace from the certainty that Oates' noble sacrifice included him becoming part of the expeditions emergency rations.  I suggested mentioning that since Oates had gangrene he was probably poisonous and therefore unfit to eat.  Instead my correspondent, unwisely, attempted to impress on an eight year old who had already made up her mind the cultural and moral objections to cannibalism.  This went down about as well as one might expect with lots of "but why?" on one side and finally an exasperated parental "because I said so" on the other.

Silenced but not convinced Grace retired and obviously decided to do some research of her own.  Since not even my tech support has been able to design a parental lock that an eight year old can't circumvent this explains the strange search terms on my correspondent's computer.

All of which reassured me but then I'm a safe distance away.  According to my correspondent there's a strange gleam in Grace's eye of late and she's starting to get nervous about taking her on long bushwalks.