Poem: No Such Thing as ‘No Such Thing as a Free Lunch’

Timeshares. Surfer’s Paradise. A Free Lunch. A Bottle of Wine…a damn good time

We were in Surfer’s Paradise in 1987 and
a man on a street corner invited us for
a free lunch — said there’d be a talk but
we would also get a bottle of wine. Dad
said fine. Told us to play along with the
timeshare presentation to get a free feed.

His geography-teacher friend was paying
extra attention during the interactive quiz,
so she won another bottle of wine. When
it came to the sign-on-the-line finale my
dad stood and told the room we had all
been impressed with what we had heard…

And now we had plenty to think about.
He is either thinking about it still, or
he stopped thinking about it as soon as
we started running down those stairs,
in that makeshift conference room.
On the Gold Coast of Australia, in 1987.