I'm headed over to Marty's old house this afternoon for what will probably be the last barbecue of summer. The weather has come good and I sweated like a Goth in Jamaica while out for my daily exercise through the grounds of the Sydney University earlier today. It should be a good afternoon - a couple of tubes, t-bones, and tunes will bring the summer season to a nice end, methinks.

It's come to my attention that I don't own an esky. How I'll keep the booze cold on the 20 minute walk down through Newtown and along Enmore Rd I do not know. Keeping it in plastic bags will allow the tell-tale clink of glass on glass to alert the local alco's, bums, and panhandlers, and I might just have a chase on my hands as I run down the street like a boozy Pied (100)Piper.

Maybe I can pull a "Great Uncle Skinny". Let me explain. One side of our family (I won't say which one) has a long and fairly uncolourful history of alcoholism and transiency running through it. And one of them also invented the humble esky.

I can remember as a kid playing on the front lawn and looking down the street, and every so often maybe once a year seeing any one of several portly, dishevelled elderly men come sweating and huffing up the street with a six-pack under one arm and a BBQ'd chook under the other.

Usually they arrived unnannounced, stayed a night or two, then disappeared again for another year. One of these such men who arrived like ships in the night every year or so was "Great Uncle Skinny".

Left to right: Unknown, Frank Donnelly (my grandfather), and Ross "Skinny" Donnelly. Taken in 1946.

Great Uncle Skinny, as a young man in his twenties, had been walking across a pedestrian crossing while drunk and hit by a car. I bring it up not because this was what caused his inner hobo to be released or anything like that, I just think its an interesting fact.

As it turns out, Great Uncle Skinny was damned near immortal. In later years, he got hit by a bus (while drunk), and some time after that hit by a shunting train while at work (most likely drunk) on the railroads.

Mum told me a story recently how when she was a little girl her Uncle Skinny would collect her and her brothers up for a Sunday afternoon outing at the beach. They would catch the bus from Fivedock in Sydneys inner suburbs and travel across town to Coogee, Manly, or Bondi.

She recalls how Great Uncle Skinny would always travel with a suitcase on these excursions and how by the time they got to the beach there would be a big pool of water under the suitcase where it was leaking ice!

*Artists rendition of the very first Esky. Actual, real, non-piss-weak-american beer not shown.

Great Uncle Skinny would get off the bus with water pouring out down the aisle, much to the bemused looks of the other passengers as he headed out on to the beach.

Opening the suitcase, one could find a dozen or so large bottles of Pilsener nestled snugly amidst several kilos of rapidly melting ice. Based on this overwhelming evidence we are convinced that Great Uncle Skinny invented the Esky (or portable wine cooler to you non-antipodeans. Aside - what is the opposite of an antipodean, a posipodean??).

Obviously Great Uncle Skinny must have been cheated out of his wonderful patent by unscrupulous shylocks and robbed of the due millions that should have flowed into the family's coffers as a result of this Nobel-Prize winning invention.

So next time you're at the park firing up the barbie and reaching into the esky for another coldie, spare a thought for  Great Uncle Skinny and have a drink for him as well. The poor bugger must be gagging for an ice-cold Reschs, I'm not sure they serve it in the great big "Members Only" bar in the sky.