I have never been to a men’s shed but I believe they’re where blokes go to prosecute the endless war with inanimate objects. If so, I understand. For I come to you now still glowing from a skirmish with a rice dispenser. Not everyone has a rice dispenser. I have one because my partner comes from a land where rice and life are synonyms, where a common greeting is have you eaten rice, where every house buys rice by the sack, where rice can be done plain or sweet or savoury or sticky or fried or boiled, where fast food comes with rice and slow food comes with rice. So we have a rice dispenser. My upbringing was so very Anglo-Saxon that I had been blessed with a nest of pubic hair long before I ever ate a plate of rice. The only form of rice I knew was sweetened, and came in a tin. Rice pudding it was called, the brand Ambrosia, and it was served with a helmet of canned sliced peaches in a syrup so thick you could feel your tooth enamel thinning under the onslaught. But even syrup couldn’t mask the pappy blandness of the rice beneath. Rice is an absorbency, a background canvas, a substrate. And one that comes with puzzles. How is it that some cultures where rice has been the staple for centuries have settled on a form of cutlery consisting of two sticks? It is hard to imagine a commodity less suited to eating with two sticks. And these are cultures, moreover, that have invented the spoon. And then, how do they grow enough of the stuff? We’ve all seen how it’s cultivated — the women in coolie hats against the sun, shin deep in mud and bent like paper clips as they plunge seedling after seedling into the ooze. Even allowing for the famed industriousness of the locals, how can this produce all that rice, those United Nations convoys full of sacks of the stuff, the Asian markets with their rice mountains? There has to be a vast and mechanised form of rice production, but where and how and why have I never seen it? Why is it always those paperclip women and the little flooded paddy? But anyway, the rice dispenser was over-dispensing. Press the button for one cup of raw rice and you heard it cascade into the drawer below. But then it would keep cascading. And even when eventually that cascading ceased, the cessation was fragile. Nudge the dispenser and it would start again. It was like a mountain after heavy snowfall where the whole slope is teetering, and a single footstep or a whispered word can trigger an avalanche. Last night when I went to cook rice for dinner, I withdrew the drawer from the dispenser with a watchmaker’s caution, breath held, toes curled, my nerve ends twitching like a cat’s tail. I turned away from the pantry, breath still held, lifted a foot and heard the gush behind me, the avalanche that debauched in seconds a delta of raw grains across the pantry floor, a gold-embossed all-you-can-eat invitation to the rats and mice unless I swept it up. I swept it up and told the rice dispenser I’d be back. I was back this morning. The thing is free-standing, a foot square and three foot tall (if you’re a metric creature, that’s a forearm across and high as your thigh.) Before it could sense my presence and start avalanching I swept it off its base and laid it on its back across my arms like a drunk bride, and bore it to a table in the garage. I prised off the top, tipped the rice out into a bucket, and peered into the cavernous interior. Nothing seemed amiss. I levered off the front panel to get at the mechanism. Two plastic lugs, brittle with age, snapped off, but I had exposed the spring-driven device that apportions the rice into cupfuls. Nothing seemed amiss. I twanged the springs, checked the connections with the external buttons, swept the whole thing with a brush. Nothing seemed amiss. I reassembled it. Where the lugs had gone I wrapped the assembly round with duct tape. I tipped the rice back in, put the top on, pressed the button for one cup of rice and got one cup of rice. I nudged the dispenser. No extra rice cascaded. I kicked the dispenser. No extra rice cascaded. I shook the dispenser like an exorcising priest. No extra rice cascaded. I grinned, reached around to pat my own back and returned the dispenser to the pantry. I have no idea how I did it but I felt men’s-shed good. Lyttelton writer Joe Bennett writes the Sleeping Dogs column for the ODT.
