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.”

A Matter of Honour

A Matter of Honour
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 26, 2014

Socialising with the school fraternity is a test of my people skills. As our five-person family veers into the car park overlooking the oval, I can see Sunday night’s Year 8 barbeque is already a mash of teenagers and parents. My 13-year-old wrenches open the back door and gallops away on his giraffe-legs, fearing someone might link him to the mutant herd who just pulled up in the ute. I watch as he camouflages himself amongst a clump of boys grazing from an enormous bowl of chips.

My children’s father bails on me next. He calls over his shoulder as he peels off towards the playground: “You go mingle, Blossom – I’ll give the two small ones a run around before it gets dark!” I heave the picnic basket and a blanket thatched with grass clippings over the tailgate. Schlepping them up the embankment towards the pavilion, I scan the throng for a friendly face.

I recognise my son’s housemaster bearing down on me, his beefy arms toting towers of plastic cups. We’ve met just the once, a brief handshake, amid the melee of new parents at the start of the school year. As he strides towards me, I wonder if I should stop and say hello, or spare the poor man the ignominy of trying to remember whose mother I am. We make eye contact and he nods at me politely. My mouth drops open to greet him, and I squeak like a skittish schoolgirl: “Oh hi Mr Smales!”

He cocks his left eyebrow as he barrels past. I cringe. Mr Smales? What was I thinking? Since when does a mature woman call a grown man Mr? I squirm with embarrassment.

Later, under cover of darkness and emboldened by the sugar hit from my second wedge of pavlova, I recount my faux pas to a seasoned high school mum. “What’s the protocol for parents addressing teachers these days?” I ask.

“First name basis, always” she says matter-of-factly, then titters. “Geez, you are funny! I haven’t called anyone Mr since I was sixteen! How he’d take it?”

“I dunno,” I said. ”But I feel like a halfwit!”

In the 80’s, when I grew up, it was unthinkable to address my friends’ parents as anything but Mr and Mrs Clarke, or Dr and Mrs Potter. The title was proof of the insurmountable distance between us. Such formalities bred respect. Dr Potter and his lofty moniker guaranteed we teenagers were too scared to sample the Dunhill Reds he kept stashed in his office. We nicked our mothers’ Virginia Slims instead.

As a schoolgirl, a teacher’s Christian name was prized information. Huddled in the library, we’d marvel at the chain of events that led Lizzie’s mum, Mrs House, to tell Wendy’s mum, Mrs Downs, who told Wendy, who earned celebrity status by revealing that the ‘real’ name of our favourite Human Biology teacher, Mrs Fisher, was Topsy. Yes! Topsy! Breathlessly we’d whisper “Guess what!” up and down the Year 9 corridor until we converged on Mrs Fisher’s class that afternoon. Our frog dissections were well under way when the smart-alice, back row, stuck up her hand. “Mrs Fisher – is it true your real name is Topsy?” she asked. We froze, scalpels in mid-air. “Don’t you wish you’d married Mr Turvey?!” It was a lame joke, but by now, we girls were hysterical. Mrs Fisher, bless her, was grinning too.

I would do a double-take if anyone called me Ms Thomas. My children’s friends all call me Ros. Or often, Ross (“How come your mum has a man’s name?”)

It infuriates me when tele-marketers from Mumbai call the house and tack a fawning ‘Well Ms Thomas…’ onto the front of their every sentence, presuming their sycophantic charm will persuade me to part with my money.

I try to recall the last time I used someone’s title in greeting. I interviewed Marcel Marceau eight years ago in Sydney, and was firmly instructed by his minder to address him as Monsieur Marceau throughout. I needn’t have been warned, I was already quaking with nerves. I heard later a scribe from a rival outfit had been overly chummy beginning a question with “Marcel…” His interview ended abruptly in an angry flash of white glove.

Driving home from the school barbecue, I asked teenage son if I’d goofed up by addressing his House Master as Mr?

“It depends, Mum. Did you say it in that girly sing-song voice that you get when you’re nervous?”

I was cornered.

“I might have, but if I did, at least he’ll respect me in the morning.” 

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!”