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.”

Running on Empty

Running on Empty
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 8, 2014

I had always presumed early morning exercisers were chipper creatures, all bounce and bonhomie. I pictured them in their neon lycra peppering their 6am conversations with jaunty clichés such as ‘Life is short!’ or ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead!’

For years I’ve envied early-risers their kinetic superiority, their alertness, their chirpy sociability. Waking up should be a laborious, cantankerous process – and if I’m attempting it, I should be avoided until after breakfast.

Now, I am an early-morning exerciser – by default. At dawn, I disentangle myself from the small sweaty octopus who has crept into our bed and commandeered my pillow. Three-year-old daughter has been unusually generous in allowing me a handkerchief of bare sheet. She and her father are rolled up in the doona like pigs in a blanket.

I stagger out to the kitchen and flick the kettle on, staring mindlessly at the puffs of steam beading the wall with sweat. Tea bag brewing, I lurch out to collect the paper. The box tree nuts are lying in wait for me. Several of them launch their spikes into my left foot, and my sluggish brain jolts awake to record the pain. Bloody box trees!

I drink my tea and command my eyes to focus on the front page. It shifts blurrily before me because my reading glasses are not where I left them on the kitchen bench. I give up on the paper and scoop up some shorts and a T-shirt from the bedroom floor. I strap my two remaining assets into a sports bra, knot the broken laces on my sneakers and blunder out the back door. This may be the only half hour I have to myself all day.

At the corner, I cock my head to listen to a kookaburra in a date palm. A veneer of geniality begins to glaze my brain.

I am awake at last. By the time I’ve jogged up to the playing fields, I have flowered into my agreeable self. A middle-aged woman and her elderly black Labrador cross the path. ‘Morning,’ I chirrup. ‘Morning,’ she barks back, as if taking offence.

Around the oval I go, saluting my fellow early-risers: ‘Hi there!’   

Not one of them greets me first. I turn it into a game: will they or won’t they? Coming past the tennis courts, a barrel-chested man is striding towards me. Ten metres out, I make eye contact, smile and wait for his mouth to move. Nothing. He swivels his head to look at the bougainvillea on the fence. I throw self-consciousness aside and, at the last moment, I hail him with a sprightly: ‘Morning!’ In return, he gives me a sigh tacked on to a grunt: ‘Mornin’ (no exclamation mark).

For a while there, on my pre-Cornflake jaunts, I thought it was me. I mentally exchanged places with these pre-occupied dog-walkers and stony-faced joggers and put myself in their rainbow-coloured sneakers: ‘Oh no! Here she comes again! Jeez, who shuffles like that?! I’m not saying hello to someone wearing a headband!’

This was too awful a scenario to contemplate. Dawn-risers must want to be alone with their thoughts. They don’t want womanly greetings before 7am. They are enjoying the last breath of cool air. They are quietly calculating their superannuation. They’re wondering who Geoffrey Edelsten will marry next.

And then came an epiphany! Maybe my fellow early-risers just can’t be bothered being polite? Maybe they tolerate my ‘Good Mornings’ but are too selfish to reciprocate? After all, why be generous to strangers? Perhaps they think neighbours sharing an oval should be treated with disdain or indifference? 

After lunch, undeterred, I took my annoying pleasantries to the shops. Outside Coles, I struggled to separate two trolleys locked in canine-style congress. I finally wrenched them apart and offered a trolley to a well-heeled older woman. I admired her crisp shirt and smart hair-cut: “You look lovely today.” 

“You mean, for my age?”  

“No, no, I meant, you look very stylish.“

“I’m 81. I should know how to dress by now.”

I was shamed into silence. She weaved away to the delicatessen.

I replayed our conversation in my head. Could she have mistaken my friendliness for impertinence? I decided she probably wasn’t accustomed to fellow shoppers making conversation. I felt disheartened. 

On the next morning’s jog , a stranger charged over the hill towards me. His toothpick legs stuck out of his baggy white shorts and his arms were flapping at odd angles. Mesmerised by his gawkiness, I was caught off guard when he called: “Good morning young lady!” His exuberance was infectious (and not just because he called me ‘young’ and ‘lady’). “How many laps to go?” he shouted. “All three,” I shot back. “Aaah,” he called over his shoulder as he jerked past, “no more pudding for you!”

To the manner born

To the manner born
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday September 28, 2013

At my neighbourhood cafe, social order is upheld by the good breeding of its customers. Crass, rude, ignorant oafs are not tolerated here. Customers know to walk outside to answer their mobiles. The discourteous cop withering stares for jumping the coffee queue. We’re the bad manners police: we catch and kill our own.

Last Thursday morning, my curiosity got the better of me and I asked my friendly barista: “Where’s the baby?”

He was puzzled too. A newborn’s cry, high-pitched and grating, filled the cafe. It had the familiar staccato rhythm of all distressed babies: that frenzied pattern of hoarse barks that pains a mother’s ears and lodges in her gut. We both began scanning the tables. I couldn’t see any baby capsules tucked beside chair legs. No anxious mums were tending prams on the footpath. That newborn wailing drowned out the cafe music and stopped conversation. “Where’s it coming from?” called a middle-aged woman sitting by the wall.

“Is it coming from the kitchen?” offered two young girls in the corner. The barista left his burbling machine to check. I wandered back to my table with my tea, still casting about for the howler. The only customers who didn’t seem perturbed were a grandma and grandpa, trying to keep a toddler entertained with a biscuit and their mobile phone.

The waitress was the first to zero in on the distress cry. It was coming from the grandma’s phone: she was playing the toddler a video – presumably of the newest baby in the family.

“Excuse me” the waitress said, “but your phone is disturbing our customers. Would you mind turning it down?”

“Oh for goodness sake!” said the grandma, immediately taking offence. “It’s not loud. Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Well, it’s louder than our music and it’s upsetting our customers” the waitress replied. Could you please turn it down.”

The grandma grunted towards her husband, then scooped up her belongings. She grabbed the toddler by the hand, scraped a chair out of the way and barged out the door.

We all exchanged quizzical looks and tut-tutted over the drama. The grandma with the loud phone had been disciplined for the common good. Cafe society resumed with a round table discussion on civil niceties.  

Sometimes, even small discourtesies are infuriating. I shake my head in disbelief when drivers refuse to let me merge. I glower at people who sidle into the middle of my line at the checkout. And I’m always appalled at the rudeness of customers who expect to be served first, having arrived last. When   confronted by the arrogant or self-righteous rule-breaker, I feel compelled to mete out some small measure of punishment: a dirty look, a cutting remark. But I rarely give in to the impulse to mouth off: for some reason I don’t feel old enough.  

On a rare outing to the cinema last week, I sat behind a nerdy bloke who gave me (and everyone within a three row radius) a running commentary on the merits and lineage of Apple computers. It was a pointless exercise given we were watching the biopic about Steve Jobs. For several minutes, we listened to the boorish prattle from computer nerd, Row G, until a businessman sitting next to me clenched his teeth and delivered a loud: “Shhh!”  

Being an obnoxious kind of nerd, Row G loudmouth continued his critique until a gravelly voice from somewhere behind me exploded: “Quiet! Or I’ll have you thrown out!”  

A sea of heads swivelled on rubbernecks and several of us clapped our appreciation. One man had enforced cinema’s first commandment: Do not speak above a whisper. (Better still, do not speak.) The nerd, Row G, fell silent. Social order had been restored. 

I was a public nuisance once. Aged 21, I would drive my flatmate from Scarborough to the city, where we both worked. Running late as always, we’d hit Powis street and groan. In the right hand lane, waiting to turn onto the freeway were cars queued 100m back from the on-ramp. So I would hoon up the inside lane to the front of the queue. There, I’d stop dead, and snap on my indicator. At the slightest gap, I’d nudge my way into the turn lane and in front of whichever poor sod had been inching patiently forwards. Whooping with delight, I’d theatrically wave my thanks in my rear view mirror and speed onto the freeway. Usually, the driver behind would throw up his hands in contempt.  I would feel a moment’s guilt and then a rush of adrenalin for pulling off yet another peak hour coup.

This became a daily infraction – my girlfriend would cover her face with her hands and cringe: “I can’t look! Tell me when it’s over!” Even now I’m amazed at my rudeness. (Back then, I called it ingenuity).

As a reformed rule-breaker who’s now a stickler for manners, I’m ready to atone for my driving sins. So next time I cut you off on the freeway, I won’t be the slightest bit offended when you overtake me and shout through your window: “Moron! Are you blind?!”

Minus glasses, I am blind, but I guess that’s not what you’re driving at.