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ideas.)
    Mum and Dad have all their friends around for a big cook-up on Boxing Day. Normal families have sausages on a barbie. We have bigos .
    Bigos is like a Polish stew. It’s a brew of old meat with bucketfuls of rotten cabbages, old apples and overripe tomatoes.
    Every Boxing Day Dad gets up before the sun. A couple of minutes later the smell of frying cabbage and onion pollutes the whole house. Fried cabbage smells like a rotting rat that’s got stuck up a drainpipe.
    Then Dad starts dumping in the meat. First in are the ox tongues. Then pork knuckles and a couple of kilos of bacon, followed by cubed rump steak. Don’t be confused by the word ‘rump’, it means ‘butt’. Cow’s butt, to be exact.
    After that, Dad adds more buckets of cabbage, then some sausages. Then he stirs in some tomatoes and apples, and tops it all off with—wait for it—more cabbage.
    Late in the morning all our neighbours and friends start arriving.
    Uncle Scott came around early this year with some extra garden tables and chairs.
    ‘How are you going with the money for the tinnie?’ he asked me.
    ‘Not so well, Uncle Scott.’
    ‘Mate, y’know, I’d give it to you if I could. But I need all the money I can get at the moment to fit out the coffee van.’
    ‘We’ll get the money. You’ll have it by the end of the holidays,’ I said.
    ‘Mate, I hope you do. It’s a terrific little boat and I’d love to see it stay in the family.’
    So many people came around this year that some of the neighbours brought their own picnic rugs and set them up on the front lawn. There must have been fifty people.
    Tearley and her mum turned up.
    Tearley’s mum made a beeline for my mum and I was sure she was going to tell her about the snow-dome incident. I was dead.
    But when I looked over, Tearley’s mum was helping my mum with the salads and they were both laughing.
    I was hoping Wrigs would turn up. When his mum arrived, carrying a cake, I asked if he was coming.
    ‘No, Callum wanted to spend the day at his cousins,’ she said.
    Wrigs’ real name is Callum. Callum Finnigan. We became friends when we sat next to each other in kindy. The teacher used to always complain he wouldn’t sit still which is why he is called Wriggler.
    Wrigs hates going to see his cousins. He once told me that he would rather swim in a vat of acid than spend an hour with them. But he chose to spend Boxing Day at their place rather than mine. We really mustn’t be friends any more.
    So there were fifty people at my place and no one to hang with. I sat between Dean and Squid to eat lunch. Freakishly, bigos tastes pretty good. The thing about it though is that it produces more methane gas than any other food. About five minutes after I finished there were a couple of squeaks. Dean was looking pretty happy with himself.
    ‘I bet I can fart the alphabet,’ he said.
    And he did. He farted from A right through to Z.
    Squid was looking at Dean as though he was a superhero. I kind of admired the control, but the smell was unbearable.
    When Tearley asked me if I wanted to go skimming I said yes, even though she is my archenemy.
    I was scared about running into Mr Black, so I was hoping to convince Tearley to go somewhere else along the river to skim.
    ‘Did Wrigs tell you about Mr Black?’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘The guy who hangs down by the river?’ I said.
    ‘Oh, the big scary guy who Wrigs says is going to set up a terrorist training camp?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘In Pensdale? As if,’ she said. ‘Wrigs is such a wuss. I bet Mr Black is just some dude who’s got a really boring job that he doesn’t want to go to. He’s wagging it and has got nowhere else to go all day.’
    There’s no way I was going to let Tearley think I was a wuss too, so we went to the usual spot on the river to skim. Luckily Mr Black wasn’t there.
    On my first skim the rock landed perfectly and jumped back into the air like a rocket. Then it bounced again, and again, and again, and kept on