A Very Dear Tin of Ham

I came home on Thursday to find a very sad-looking pile of groceries on the counter in the kitchen. There was a loaf of bread, some spaghetti, a frozen enchilada dinner and two tins of chopped ham. The Marks & Spencer receipt next to the food showed that the total for all of it was less than €5, and it had been paid for with a gift certificate. I marvelled at the quantity of (admittedly not entirely appealing) food one could buy for so little money and then sat down to eat my own food.

One of my flatmates came into the kitchen just then and went over to the pile on the counter. He picked up one of the tins of chopped ham and attempted to open it. The pin that he tried to use to peel back the lid came off in his hand, and he had a small meltdown. "The pin came off my pudding" he exclaimed. He clicked his tongue in exasperation, then continued his tirade: "For f***'s sake! That was dear enough! It's from Marks & Spencer!" I had to try really hard at this point not to laugh. For one thing, all of his food had cost less than €5. The enchilada meal would have been most expensive by far, so the tinned ham couldn't have cost more than 70 or 80 cents. Plus, he hadn't even used his own money. He gets the M&S gift certificates from his work when he has to go in on Saturdays. This is in addition to being paid time-and-a-half or double time.

After the pin mechanism failed, he decided to try to open the container with a tin opener. Unfortunately for him (and the rest of us), he lost the tin opener. He also apparently forgot that he lost the tin opener and launched into a desperate, rummaging search of the kitchen drawers. He finally gave up and asked, "Do you think I can open this with a knife?" He managed to stab a small opening in the top of the tin without drawing blood, then commented on the disgusting smell that wafted from it. It's chopped ham, so I'm not exactly sure what he'd expected. In any event, all of this became too overwhelming for him and he aggressively chucked the tin into the bin. As a backup, he decided to eat the frozen enchilada. "How do you cook this, then? Oven? You can't microwave it, can you? Oh, for f***'s sake! 20-25 minutes!"

The story grew even funnier a few days later. My expat friends came over to my flat on Sunday for a take-away curry. I'd told them about the tin episode earlier, and they'd both found it hilarious. After we finished eating, one of them went to put her leftovers in the fridge until she went home. She found the second tin of ham inside and took it out to inspect it. We discovered then that the pin is supposed to come off. There's a slot on the side of the tin where you put the pin and then turn it to peel back the lid. This is very, very obvious if you spend any time looking at the packaging. I could see it from across the table.

We were all in hysterics about how my flatmate had gotten so angry over nothing. Then, right on cue, he came home. One of my friends had to leave the room after meeting him because she couldn't keep from laughing. I kept snickering periodically, hopefully at appropriate times to make it sound like I was laughing in response to whatever he and my other friend were saying. Luckily she was able to keep herself pulled together.

I continued to laugh every time I thought about this yesterday, which was the perfect antidote to walking to work in the dreary, rainy and windy Irish winter weather. It turns out that tin has become dear in a way my flatmate never would have imagined.