Feeding Frenzy

Feeding Frenzy
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 3, 2015

I glanced up from my laptop as the cafe door swung open and a draught fanned my face. A spruce gent in a navy blazer entered the cafe and politely closed the door behind him. He squeezed his large frame behind the table next to mine, acknowledging his intrusion with a smile.

I resumed tapping away as he flapped open a newspaper. A waitress soon delivered his coffee and a mound of bacon and eggs. He must have been starving because he immediately shed all gentlemanly conduct and fell upon his plate like a barbarian.

Knife in fist and waving his fork over his breakfast like a harpoon, he stabbed at his eggs and dragged his yolk-smeared knife between his lips. He sawed away at a doorstop of toast and crammed it sideways into his mouth, using his thumb to wedge in the last corner.

When a rasher of bacon refused to submit to the savagery of his table manners, he picked it up with his fingers and gnawed through the rind with his teeth. He chewed with his mouth open, washing down each forkful with a slurp of his coffee. After mopping his plate with a last slab of bread, he swiped the grease off his chin with the back of his hand.

I tried not to look but a morbid fascination with bad manners kept me glancing furtively in his direction. I wasn’t the only customer who’d noticed him: people were staring. That’s when a niggling voice in my head began chiding me. Don’t be such a snob, it said. So what if a bloke makes a spectacle of his breakfast? But I wondered if my neighbour was aware he’d become the centre of attention.

If manners maketh man, then my Great Uncle Andy enjoyed making a mockery of his breeding. He delighted in flouting the politesse at family gatherings. Laced with pre-dinner sherries, he’d bully his peas onto the blade of his knife. With his drinking elbow propped on the table to steady himself, he’d tilt back his head and upend the knife, raining peas into his mouth. Then he’d cast about to see who in the family had taken offence. Most ignored his antics, but as a nine year old, I was agape. I never dared try his trick – it was hard enough spearing peas with my fork.

Uncle Andy found myriad ways to play with his food, mostly for my entertainment. He’d fashion a lumpy volcano from his mashed potatoes and fill the crater with gravy. With his fork, he’d bulldoze a serving of savoury mince into a variety of 3-D shapes. And one by one, he’d herd a pile of limp grey beans off his plate and into hiding in his serviette. “You still have to eat them,” Nan’d admonish her younger brother, already in his 60s. “Don’t think I didn’t see you.”

Uncle Andy was what Mum called a ‘confirmed bachelor,’ using bad manners, isolation and avoidance to keep lady-suitors at bay. Nan maintained he was yet to be seduced by feminine wiles. The rest of the family called him Handy-Andy, but I never saw him build anything. I just admired his cheek.

In our house, table manners are a hit and miss affair. I hear myself parroting the nagging mantras of my childhood: “Elbows off the table, sit up straight, chew with your mouth closed, don’t talk with your mouth full.” And for my teenager’s benefit: “Get that phone off the table!”

My middle lad, aged eight, drives me mad, using his fingers as a fork. I start on him nicely: “Fork in your left hand, knife in your right, darling. You’ve got them the wrong way round. That’s it. Prongs down.” His fingers creep onto his plate again. “For goodness sake!” I cry. “Eat like that, and you won’t be invited anywhere!” Call me a prig but the hallmark of civilisation is that we don’t eat like animals.

These days, too often, we’re eating distractedly in front of the telly. Meals have become solitary occasions instead of social ones. Manners are forgotten as we wolf down a curry watching re-runs of Antiques Roadshow. Dinner-time used to be for round table discussions of the day’s obstacles and adventures. It was a chance to instil the punctilios of politeness in the next generation: the excuse me’s and thank you’s and ‘pass the salt and pepper, please.’

Even on telly, table manners are woeful. As we were watching the final episode of Masterchef last season, celebrity chef Gary Mehigan licked his knife after scraping the sauce off a plate. “Holy cow!” I exclaimed to the corn-fed gourmand beside me on the sofa. “Did you see that?”

“Yeah,” came the reply. “That pork looked undercooked to me.”

Bite Your Tongue

Bite Your Tongue
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 6, 2014

It was the first roadhouse I’d seen in forty-five minutes and I needed coffee and petrol. In that order. I swung off the Brand highway and pulled up at the pump, feeling dwarfed by the half a dozen road trains stretched out across the carpark.

At the counter, I stood beside a truckie who made me feel petite.

“A coupla cheese sausages and a pie n’ sauce,” he said.

In the bain-marie, two shrivelled sausages with wrinkly red hides lay sweating behind the glass.

“How’d they get the cheese in?” I said, thinking out loud.

“Beats me,” said the truckie, “but they’re bloody good,” and he slapped a ten dollar note on the counter and gathered up his two paper bags.

While the waitress made my coffee, I tried guessing what was inside the crumbed and battered shapes glowing under the warmer. The square ones were likely hash browns, I decided. The yellow rings would be squid. Or maybe onion? I could tell the crabsticks by their customary pink stripe .

My late step-father, Stan, refused to call them crabsticks. “They don’t put an ounce of crab in them!” he’d snort. He called them Sea Legs instead. (Stan was convinced “they” were also responsible for eighteen minutes of missing Watergate tape, the disappearance of Harold Holt and the refusal of a brand new Victa lawn mower to start on the first pull.)

Growing up in the 70s, the arrival of convenience food gave the Watsonia polony knob cult status in our kitchen. “At last!” my Nan’d say admiringly, as she sawed through the rubbery tube with a bread knife. “Someone’s making life easier.”

The polony knob was always served cold from the fridge, sliced into thick discs and sandwiched between buttered slices of cob loaf. Nan called it luncheon meat, and marvelled at its durability. Polony knobs lasted for a fortnight. They never dried out and retained their lovely rosy shade until the very last slice (which was puckered, obscenely, where the metal catch pinched closed the tube.)

For a while there, ‘polony pink’ was my favourite colour. But Nan said polony was actually ‘Baker-Miller pink.’ “That’s the colour they’re painting asylums these days,” she explained, pointing to the little pile of polony slices on my open sandwich. “I read in the Reader’s Digest that a psychologist called Mr Baker, and his colleague Mr Miller, discovered a shade of pink that keeps patients calm and compliant.”

As a child with excitable tendencies, I always calmed down after lunch, which, according to Nan, only enhanced polony’s reputation as a superfood. I was never convinced the Watsonia polony knob tasted like meat, but it didn’t taste like broccoli either, which was all that mattered.

Usually a Nan’s polony sandwich came with a side serving of Kraft processed cheese. We called it ‘plastic cheese’ as a compliment. It, too, appeared indestructible. Plastic cheese came cocooned in Alfoil inside a small silver and blue cardboard box. I recycled those cheese boxes as coffins for pet snails who inexplicably expired on their diet of grass clippings and polony crumbs.

No matter how high Nan cranked the griller, plastic cheese never melted like normal cheese. It sat on my toast like a doormat. Even if the bread was cremated, plastic cheese would only ever develop a black blister. Poked with a knife, the blister would shatter into a fine layer of ash.

By the time I was a teenager, Mum had discovered French Onion dip. She made it from scratch by tipping two sachets of Continental French Onion Soup Mix into half a litre of sour cream. Even now, I can’t understand how a dish so high in calories didn’t make me a fattie. Perhaps because it was too repulsive to eat. French Onion dip couldn’t be saved even by Ritz crackers.

Mum’s coleslaw however, was a triumph of convenience cuisine. It contained the usual shredded cabbage and carrot, but she added a tin of Golden Circle crushed pineapple and a handful of sultanas to give it a tropical edge. Then she took the edge off with a whole jar of Miracle Whip mayonnaise. It was the perfect accompaniment to a mob of lamb chops with fatty tails and a scoop of Deb instant mashed potato.

Back at the roadhouse, I paid for my coffee and contemplated a chocolate bar, casting my eye over the sea of shiny wrappers. Some were new to me with names I didn’t recognise – Crispello, Pods, Bubbly. “Whatever happened to the Polly Waffle?” I said to the young waitress.

“The what?” she said, giving me a guarded look.

“The Polly Waffle!” I repeated. “You know – that chocolate log-thing with the tube of white marshmallow inside!”

“Never heard of it,” she said. “But it sounds gross.”

Racking up the years

Racking up the years
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West Magazine
Published Saturday February 23, 2013

My first bra came from Jayne Mansfield’s closet. At least it felt like it did. It was pale pink satin and doubled as a bullet-proof vest. The label said ‘Action’ bra but that was the last thing I was going to get in it. The hooks at the back were large enough to catch herring, there was not a skerrick of elastic for comfort and I needed to be Houdini to get in or out of it. Houdini, or a locksmith.

That bra came from the bottom of mum’s drawer of antiquity and I’m pretty sure the cups hadn’t seen breasts since 1953. But I was 13 and desperate. It was Thursday night, there was school on Friday and late night shopping hadn’t been invented. My breasts and I could not face another round of heckling from the leering boys who hung on the fence watching our school softball.

That afternoon, my bra-less dash round the bases clinched the game – but my breasts must have sailed over the home plate before I did, because those boys started cheering: ‘Hey yer headlights ‘r on! Yer blinding us with yer high beams!’

I was deflated. And humiliated. So that night, mum dug through her cupboard and unearthed her heirloom bra. I thought I was going to be swallowed in it, but if it kept my particulars under wraps, I was prepared to wear it. And so began a complicated relationship with my breasts.

For 30 years, I have re-played that bra-less home run as my Bo Derek moment. Me: nubile gazelle-woman, running in slow motion, nothing jiggling, just a gentle swaying up front, spectators mesmerised. That was until I took up jogging last year and the man of the house watched me stumble in through the gate: ‘Hey blossom, Dudley Moore would have been proud of that running style. Even sober.’

Having worn a bra since 1980, I’ve grown accustomed to constriction. (Breasts that don’t move are my objective now.) But women are never happy with what they’ve got. Breasts are always too small, too pointy, too cumbersome or just too big: those boobs so outspoken they take all the male attention off your face: ‘Hey soldier – eyes up and front!’

Why are men still fixated on breasts when half the population has them? And why are there so many names for them? In the 50’s there are photos of my mum in bras so pointy they could take your eye out: “Look at the lungs on that sheila!”. By the 60’s bosoms were ‘Bristol cities’ and winging it freestyle. In the 70’s,  ‘A Clockwork Orange’ called them ‘Groodies’ and then foxy mammas went disco: ‘Check out the rack on that chick!’ In 1982, Jane Fonda dressed her Pointer Sisters in lycra and aerobics took over the gym. By the time I was at school we were comparing ‘hooters’ and girls with ‘bodacious ta-ta’s’ were flaunting their assets every chance they got.   

Now I notice two types of women: those who dress for the breast and those who don’t – women are either offence or defence. Some breasts are so properly controlled they’re standoffish. Others aren’t shy enough – they’re in your face everywhere  – spilling out of the waitress’ uniform as she takes your order, or blindsiding you in the supermarket aisle.

I pity men confronted with a pair of barely contained breasts. Cleavage a woman can hide her keys in is like a car crash – no man can look away. I can’t either.

Fashionable women disguise their breasts in wonder-bras and push-ups, minimisers, firmers and separaters. Breasts can be made to look bigger, higher, friskier. It’s not until we get them home that they can really be themselves and relax. (Some relax better than others.)

The breast connoisseur I live with says bosoms quicken his pulse. That’s because until he’s allowed to unwrap them, he doesn’t know what he’s going to get: ‘I’ve never been disappointed. I’m just thrilled to see them in the wild at all.’

My breasts have served me well. They’ve done their hard work putting fat cheeks on three babies,they’ve not complained about getting up in the middle of the night or the endless dawn starts.

For that, breasts deserve some respect. Good manners dictate men don’t ogle women whose breasts are feeding babies. Or breasts that fall out of bathers while their owner gets dumped in the City Beach surf.

Maybe my breasts need to reclaim their charisma. Now I’ve finished with the business of procreation and my breasts can go back to being just for fun, I  have to juggle them into support mechanisms because they’re tired and can’t stay up late anymore.

Sometimes the sight of an impossibly pert pair of breasts makes me pine for those days when I didn’t realise how good mine were. Breasts start out in life as star-gazers and end up as path-finders, but all breasts get their quality time. I’m okay with what I’ve got. I think we’ve finally got the hang of each other.

Under the Covers

Under the Covers
Ros Thomas
The West Weekend Magazine
Published January 26, 2013
Section: Opinion

I learnt more about men and sex in 1985 than I should have, thanks to a book called The Hite Report. It was a fat well-thumbed paperback, containing interviews with hundreds of blokes on everything from ‘What Men like Women to Wear’ to ‘How A Man Likes to be Seduced.’ Its pages were coffee stained at juicy junctions, underlined and exclamation marked, and I discovered a silverfish entombed near the spine in a chapter devoted to Men’s Fantasies. (‘Stop talking’ featured heavily in the advice to women.)

I used to hide out with a girlfriend in a deserted corner of the University library, sitting on the floor between the compactors. There we would pore over the book we re-named ‘the boy bible’ absorbing every carnal secret: “Surely they can’t want us to do that?” If we were startled by approaching footsteps, we would slam our bible shut and in fits of giggles, jam it back into the shelf. That book sustained us through an entire semester of Psychology 100. I can still faintly remember the sweet woody scent of its yellowing pages.

Twenty years later, with the mysteries of marital relations (mostly) solved, I’ve made several attempts to rediscover a copy of The Hite Report on the internet or in second hand bookshops, but it’s out of print. Part of me desperately wants to be shocked anew, feel the weight of a thousand men’s desires in my hands. Like all books, that one transcends time: it is the only graspable remnant of my 17-year-old self, hungry to learn the ways of the world.

Such is the power of the book: the cleverness of minds printed onto leaves of pulped wood and sewn to leather bindings. Or bound and glued to a paperback spine. If asked to name what things I would be most devastated to lose, my book collection would top the list.

My life is bookended by the assorted volumes of other people’s imaginations in print. It began with the Golden Books read to me as a toddler in the 1970’s, every one of them saved by Mum in her longings for grandchildren. My small daughter and I now read those slim little board-books with the same wonder. For me, the illustrations are instantly recognisable even after forty years of living have got in the way.

Enid Blyton, the Famous Five and the fantasy worlds of C.S. Lewis soon followed. As a teenager, I discovered the great novels, and was carried away into the villages and slums of Thomas Hardy and Dickens, curled up in my single bed at home. At 35, newly divorced, I was overwhelmed reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, because I too felt alone and adrift, like the boy on the boat with the tiger. Books can exalt time and place, remind you where you were in life the week you read them.  Just last month, I couldn’t wait to climb into bed with the new Nigella cookbook and fantasise about the gluttonous pleasures of chestnut icecream, at the expense of the husband who gave her to me.

Stories of the death of the book are everywhere . But not once had I heard an argument that captures what it is about books I love most, until an elderly American author called Philip Zimbardo said simply: ‘It is something you hold, near to your heart.” Yes! My books too, are pressed into me.

I am drawn to bookshops – there is something soothing about browsing amongst the shelves, thumbing new books, fingering embossed covers and sharp cut edges. It’s the promise of quiet escape.

Try getting sensuous with a Kindle, or an iPad – please tell me it’s not the same? Friends, avid readers also, have emptied their houses of books, fed up with the clutter and dust. They tell me I won’t miss the clumsy mass of my books, that electronic readers are brilliant by design and just as satisfying. I don’t believe them.

Do I fear the extinction of the book? Not yet. But I fear for bookshops. I take heart knowing the internet hasn’t killed off television, that television didn’t wipe out radio, radio didn’t hurt newspapers.  Technology is changing how we read, how we buy books and store them, but I will never part with my leafy treasures.

I will, however, buy hard-to-find books on the internet, and order others on-line when they’re half the price. But some books need to be fancied and flirted with in person. A cook book, in particular, must be felt, studied, assessed for compatibility with the cook. If it still inspires after that first meeting in the shop, it can be bought and taken home in a stiff paper bag to be consumed with the same greedy thrill as a new lover.

I cannot imagine the day when I do not look upon a much desired book and want to hold it as a rare and marvellous thing. I will then carry it gently to the bath, where no Kindle dares to follow.

Tangling with a bad hair day

Tangling with a bad hair day
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Saturday January 12, 2013
Section: Opinion

A hair cut is not a trifling matter. This, men do not understand. To a man, a haircut is a way to kill fifteen minutes of a lunch hour. It involves no more mental taxation than reclining in a swivel chair arguing with a barber about Shane Warne’s discipline problem.

For women, a haircut is the fastest route to an identity crisis. Period. It can coincide with that too. I should know – I just had one – a haircut, and a freak-out. Some people will no longer recognize me because I’ve gone short – I had a whole 3 centimetres cut off. For me, a change is nowhere near as good as a holiday.

Men should also know that women have a fraught relationship with their hair because hair the only thing that can be changed at whim. And let’s face it, most women grow up wanting to change everything about themselves. Well at least I did.

I was seven when I began noticing Serena down the road had a shiny blonde ponytail like Barbie, while I had limping stick-brown plaits like a Holly Hobby doll.

My downward comparisons got worse as I became a teenager. I measured myself against other girls according to blondeness or cascading wavy-ness – and was always left lacking and dissatisfied. It was the start of an uncomfortable relationship with being female, of wasting a significant portion of my young life sizing myself up against some narrow measure of the perfect woman’s exterior.

I was in my 20’s by the time I realized my insecurities were simply character weaknesses, and I could fix those. I decided that my negative body image was unhealthy and perverse, and I would no longer indulge it (except during ‘that time of the month,’ when nothing is curable and there is no bright side.)

Women have a peculiar knack for self-loathing, something I’ve rarely seen in a man. Really, it’s a nauseatingly first world problem – I’m sure if we had to rifle through a rubbish tip to find dinner or wash our clothes on a rock by the river, we wouldn’t be giving two hoots about our hair. (We’d probably have sold it off to some merchant making fake hair extensions for the elaborately coiffed in Perth.)

Self-loathing is the flipside of self-obsession, two symptoms of that disease called vanity. Vanity must also be a side-effect of not having enough to do. I’m sure it’s nice to always look flawless – but those who aspire to perfection must find themselves slave to an entirely joyless process. After all, a bad hair day can ambush even the most military of beauty regimes.

I like to miss a few gym sessions and lose control at the smorgasbord because, well  – because I can. My friends won’t desert me and I like to imagine my husband will still think I’m a fox – he’s seen me thin(ish) and also 9-months pregnant, and hasn’t passed judgment on either. (Smart men never do.)

The cult of female beauty is ingrained at an early age. In high school, I must have frittered away days of my life wishing for longer legs and less curves, obsessing over my Roman nose and muscly calves. I couldn’t see anything but my faults. I was the sum total of a collection of ugly body parts.

Insecure as a teenager, I often mistook sexual harassment for compliments. Once, when the father of a girlfriend pinned me up against the wall of his shed after school, I felt flattered instead of repulsed. I look back on that day and still feel incredulous that my self esteem was then propped on such flimsy scaffolding.

I had the best of role models – a mum who was confident, positive, and motivated to keep fit and eat well – no closet psychoses there. I had female teachers I admired and respected, aunties and friends’ mothers I loved to bits who told me I was kind and intelligent, not pretty and thin. (I wished they’d said ‘funny’, because funny can compensate for all other shortfalls.)

I look back now and see I was much like every other girl, and every other girl was much like me: consumed with the glorified images of the impossibly glamorous models in our Dolly magazines. And yet as wives and mothers, when we’re trying to trying to stay sane juggling parenthood and working and caring for extended families, I find some women are still as competitive as ever. I don’t get it – are they forever desperate to outshine the sisterhood?  Is this relentless pursuit of perfection some misguided attempt at one-upmanship? What the blazes for? I can only surmise that there are women who need to feel envied to feel good about themselves.  In my imperfect world, that looks to me like low self-esteem. Can’t we all just admire each other?

I’ve decided the best test of a woman’s vanity is a hideous haircut – the kind of haircut that you can see is a disaster even before they’ve finished drying it.  I can recall the taste of rising panic as it dawned on me that the he-she with the scissors did his apprenticeship as a butcher, not as a hair ‘artiste.’ There I sat – (under that black plastic shroud that’s always too tight around your neck) – struck mute by the dawning realization that for the next three months, my new do would be the new don’t. And when he’d finished his masterpiece, and I was looking as inviting as a soup sandwich, I got up and grinned stupidly: “Thank you so much – no, no – really, I love it,” handed over $150 and sobbed all the way home in the car.’ People who are vain are also smart enough to cause a scene belittling the hair-man so that at least they get a free disaster, and scare off all the other clients.

I have an impeccably stylish friend who claims hair, skin, weight and clothes, in that order, betray a woman’s age. Oh dear, so boring hair now makes you look decrepit too? I’ve had it up to pussy’s bow with stylers, straighteners and hot tongs. Those blasted appliances take up fifteen minutes of my sixteen minute daily beauty regime. After all, it’s just hair, it’s not even alive, but it’s the most demanding thing I own. And I expect it will be until I’m the owner of a perm and a blue rinse. At least then I’ll take comfort in knowing the one upside to death will be never having to think about my hair.