Your Kitchen Olympics

By Frances Cahill

Will you ever be a sports champion? Are you reluctant to be described as a boomer? Are you a fridge mover or non-mover?

Join Frances Cahill, leader of the Neverolympian movement, to explore these weighty questions.

Your Kitchen Olympics … and other remarkable athletic feats provides a ready source of amusement, frustration and potential injury for you every day. Dip into these pages to see where your next gold medal is lying in wait. Your gradual physical and/or mental decline is a welcome addition to your preparation for Neverolympic fame.

If you need a reminder that life is for living and laughing right now, this is the book for you. Frances gives you another perspective on boomerdom and brings the joy back to clumsy, awkward physical activities and being loose with the truth.

Go for gold!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frances Cahill
• Release date: Aug 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645202410

Book preview

Introduction

I am a teller of stories.

I come from a long line of storytellers. Generation after generation of my mad Irish/Prussian/Jewish family has produced people who can spin a yarn, sometimes true but always entertaining.

My grandparents, my dad Jack and mum Doreen, and my aunts and uncles were our seniors, guides, advisers and loved parents.

These people were the holders of something so very precious.

They were the Tellers of Stories. These stories were the jewels to be polished and, yes, embellished as time went on.

The stories of their childhoods; the tales as they grew to adults; mischief; military service; working lives; chaos and order laid out for us to hear and absorb.

Pictures and places were built with words. Courage defined; joy subtly expressed; hardship faced because it was there.

We will always need storytellers. Life is barren without them.

Passing the thoughts and memories across generations produces the palette of colours with which each will paint their own experience.

So make the time to lie on the ground and make cloud shapes with your kids and grandkids.

Tell them about the time you were sent to the principal’s office in primary school for throwing a punch at Russell D. (Yes, that was my story – only mentioned to Mum decades after.)

Pick each story-jewel up and retell it with joy.

These life events and experiences are the fabric of our lives and bind our families (by blood or choice) together.

So I have been hearing, reading and telling stories all my life. Now as I settle into the boomerdom stage of my life, I want to celebrate the storytellers gone before me by introducing you to the fractured and clumsy stumble that is my daily life.

The broad description for my stage of boomerdom is:

A lively minded, slightly arthritic, still-working-to-pay-off-debt boomer with no athletic leanings.

We make the stories and the stories make us.

I am the founder of the Kitchen Olympics International Committee (KOIC).

This august body has been established to oversee the development and promulgation of the alternative to that other Olympic tradition of voluntary physical