Preventing & Rectifying Communication Breakdowns

“I’ll cook mince for dinner,” he said.

My visiting relative, who will remain anonymous, had come down for one of those stays. You know the ones - they drag on, seemingly endlessly, and when they finally leave the relief in the air sparks electric charges out of nowhere.

And he’d offered to cook.

Okay, we said, if you want. We didn’t know quite what he meant by mince. It had to be some sort of shorthand for a dish, right? Like when people call fettucine carbonara pasta or a Mauritian pilau sausage ? Okay, that second one is a bit far-fetched. No individual with a sense of self-preservation would call a pilau dish plain ol’ sausage in the presence of a Mauritian. Trust me on this one.

And for dinner, we each had a bowl of mince meat. It had been cooked up in a saucepan, maybe a pinch of salt added, but otherwise it was just mince meat.

We couldn’t help but wonder if what he’d meant is that he’d cook the mince as part of some communal cooking exercise that resulted in what could properly be called a dish, or if this was just the way he cooked.