The international bean bag bean saga

The other day, my husband commented that our bean bag could do with more beans, and I scowled.

We have a bean bag with a long and mixed history. It was given to my husband by a rather beautiful friend of ours, which – I suspect – is why he remains attached to it. Otherwise it is an unattractive beige bean bag that, quite early in our ownership, went through a period of being a disgusting unattractive bean bag after our toddler son vomited on it in a scene reminiscent of The Exorcist. Perhaps it was my husband’s recollections of that beautiful friend stretched across the bean bag that kept him going through the subsequent months of the bean bag smelling increasingly less like a dead thing, as it gradually returned to being a socially acceptable bean bag.

When we moved to Greenland, the bean bag came too. But after a few months in our new home, I saw my husband standing over the bean bag, frowning.

“It’s too flat,” he said, “It needs more beans.”

But in Greenland bean bag beans are one of those out-of-the-ordinary items that cannot be obtained. Over the next days he called all of the stores in Nuuk that might conceivably stock bean bag beans.

“We’ll call you back,” they said, befuddled by the query. And, in what is apparently a standard procedure in Greenland, noone called back.

So what are you supposed to do when your bean bag deflates in Greenland? Just buy a new bean bag? No. Instead, my husband took the bean bag mission global. A few weeks later, he was visiting London, where of course you can buy bean bag beans. You can buy anything in London. Travelling out with only hand luggage, he took an extra bag to check in his beans on the return leg. But at Heathrow, he was faced with an unusual predicament. When he put the bag on the luggage belt, the woman at the check-in desk frowned at it. She looked at her screen and back to him again.

“Your bag is too light,” she said, still frowning.

“Um, OK?” he said.

“It doesn’t register on the scale,” she said, now raising her eyebrows, clearly wondering what the hell was in the bag. “Can you put something else in it?” she asked.

“Oooh, no no no!” he said, shaking his head, imagining the eruption of tiny carcinogenic balls if he opened the bag. The emphaticness of his reply pushed her eyebrows even higher.

“OK, you’ll have to take it to overweight baggage,” she said, not registering the contradiction.

“OK?” replied my husband, his eyebrows creeping upwards to match hers. The two parted company on bewildered terms.

A year later our family were going on holiday to South Africa.

“We should get some more bean bag beans while we’re here,” said my husband, and I felt myself instantly slump lower into the couch.

“Really?” I replied, pleadingly.

But it was already decided. He started searching the internet for stores in Cape Town selling bean bag beans. So a few weeks later, on the last day of our holiday, we found ourselves driving through an industrial estate in Cape Town, every building surrounded by high electric fences, and pulled up outside a brown, somewhat foreboding-looking two-storey brick building where a couple of serious men, one with a gun, stood by a metal door. I hunched into the drivers’ seat and gripped the steering wheel tightly.

“Leave the engine running,” said my husband, stepping out of the car. “Just drive around the block if there’s any trouble.”

But without incident, minutes later, he returned with an elongate plastic bag filled with three kilograms of bean bag beans. Three kilograms is a lot of bean bag beans. The bag was as tall as him and already seeping polystyrene balls from the splitting seams. He stuffed the bag into the back seat of the car, wedging it around our sleeping son. There was clearly no way it would fit into our check in luggage.

In the airport carpark, I volunteered to stay in the car with our sleepy son. I wasn’t going to help getting those beans into the empty check in bag we’d brought for the purpose. Taking the enormous bag of beans, he sneaked around the side of a service station, out of public view, to stuff beans into the small empty bag. I watched him in the rear view mirror of the car, arms deep in the bag of beans, tiny balls fluffing around him. I sighed, thinking of the environment as wafts of white balls drifted off in the breeze. It seemed like a massively inefficient process of transferral. Eventually he returned with the bag full and strapped shut and stood sheepishly by the open back door in a halo of tiny beans that then found their way into all the little nooks and crannies in the car.

Finally, we made it home and, in our living room, we carefully, gently, opened the bag, as if some rapacious creature lurked within, and poured the precious beans gently, slowy, in a softly whooshing stream into the flaccid beige bean bag. And zipped it shut.

I sank into the now much firmer bean bag, assessing the smattering of tiny beans that had escaped into corners and along skirting boards, wondering how many weeks would pass until I could retrieve them all. And I hoped for a longevity of that firmness to keep my husband’s international bean bag bean buying antics at bay.