Emu Eggs, Bombs Away

Maria woke at 2.00am last Friday, alarmed at the sound of an explosion in her house. Thinking the explosion must be gas related, she quickly set about finding it. It didn't take long to find the source of the big bang.
More than a year ago, Maria's grandchilren had been wandering in the far reaches of her fifty acres and came back with an emu egg, much to their amusement. The egg sat in a bowl in Maria's living room, a novelty item for visitors, including the grandchildren on subsequent visits.
It was the emu egg that blew, spraying the living room with it it's vile smelling contents. A smell so bad that many hours of cleaning and deodorising had failed to remove. I had no wish to go inside and sample it myself, prefering when finished my little gardening job to decline Maria's offer of a cup of tea and a sandwich. I remember in my youth riding my pushbike from Mt. Waverley to Doncaster with Graeme Edgelow to visit friends of his family who owned a duck farm. There were thousands of ducks both inside the delapidated sheds and wandering outside. There were duck eggs all over the place and once Graeme picked up an egg and threw it at me, which of course began a duck egg fight. All very well till you got hit with an old rotten one. Nothing is quite like the stink. Imagine a large emu egg cooking up to explode during all that hot weather.
Jod was amused by the exploding emu egg story when I told him later. A wicked laugh came over him as he told me of the time when as kids, he and Steve Edgelow, Graeme's older brother, went to the Melbourne Zoo with the intention of stealing emu eggs for their bird egg collections. The mission successful, coming home on the train with a bag containing more eggs than they needed, when the train was between Spencer St. and Flinders St. stations at the bottom end of of Flinders St where the train goes over the bridge, they pelted emu eggs onto the rooves of cars. Imagine some poor bloke down on his luck having to go home with his car splattered and possibly dented and tell his wife the mess was caused by emu eggs that fell from high.