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.”

Bean there, done that

Bean there, done that
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday January 18, 2014

For six years I have existed in a wasteland of sodden tea leaves and limp, spent teabags. Coffee and I parted ways over heart palpitations and the jitters. Even so, it was a bitter breakup: doctor’s orders.

At cafes, I now endure the taunts of coffee-drinking friends: “Tea? Really? (Smirk) Ok – water in a cup for her. I’ll have a skinny double-shot, extra-hot, flat white, in a takeaway cup.”

Coffee snobbery is rife amongst Perth poseurs. At my local coffee house, my delicate teacup and saucer signposts me as persona non grata.  Apparently, I take up too much space at the pocket-sized tables with my collection of dinky pots (one for hot water) and my jug of frigid milk.

I have but one ally who shares my disdain for coffee snobs: a lawyer no less (and a tea-totaller to boot). Emboldened by the promise of anonymity, he sounded off at a recent poolside barbeque: “Coffee addicts are an unholy alliance between heroin junkies and wine snobs. Of course, they mask their sad dependence by acting self-righteous and superior. But we non coffee-drinkers are very tolerant people.” (His wife took me behind a palm tree to say: “He thinks he’s a small L liberal, but really he’s a big F fascist).”

Cafe society has its own pecking order and tea-drinkers are its eccentrics.  Coffee purists would rather we Mad Hatters fraternised amongst ourselves out of sight. They would prefer we took tea at home in our Wonderlands resplendent with knitted tea cosies, Wedgwood china and silver spoons. That’s where time stands still and it’s never too late for a cuppa tea.

My husband, too, is a smug caffeine addict. At work, he’ll schlep up and down St George Terrace in pursuit of his preferred barista. Town baristas have cult followings. My husband’s current favourite has a nose ring and a front mullet (ristretto drinkers call that a frollet). Last I heard, that hairy barista and his coffee machine were operating to wide acclaim from a hole in a wall in London Court (brick dust makes the coffee taste authentically Colombian).

I tell you this because I like to practice hypocrisy. Last week, as my tea-rista filled my pot with steaming water, he leaned conspiratorially across the counter: “Don’t you miss coffee?”

I went blank. Then I weaved my way back to my table juggling my saucer and rattling cup in one hand – teapot and milk jug in the other. Boiling water dripped onto my big toe. I jumped, and my spoon clattered to the floor: a flotilla of heads jerked up from their macchiatos and skinny lattes and their riveting coffee-enhanced conversations.

Under the scrutiny of that cafe crowd, I had an epiphany: I did miss coffee! I missed being dark and dangerous and brooding. I missed sneering at tea-drinking fools. I re-traced my steps to the counter and announced: “Okay, Alberto, I surrender! Gimme me a weak flat white.”

He winked at me and belted his last puck of spent coffee grounds into the knockbox: “One lukewarm milkshake for the born-again coffee virgin coming right up!” The businessman at my elbow snickered.

Within an hour of that coffee, my single entendres had doubled. My brain was Stephen Hawkingly-alert. I began reciting TS Eliot in my head. I decided I too, could measure out my life in coffee spoons. And then I drifted home in a daze of caffeine euphoria.

My renewed infatuation with coffee has caused some consternation at home. My husband now has to share his prized coffee machine. Some mornings, I catastrophise that he loves that coffee machine more than me.

My husband is fastidious about his morning brew. He’s obsessed with the surgical cleaning of his beloved contraption. Most mornings this week, he has beckoned me from my lukewarm milkshake to lecture me on why I should be grateful to have a three-some with his machine.

He gruffly points out the trail of coffee grounds across the kitchen bench. He gets down on his hands and knees to demonstrate how they have spilled onto the floor and made it gritty. He accuses me of not wiping the dark orifice where the groupo attaches to the machine. (Only coffee nerds could come up with a name like groupo for a metal filter with a handle). He says I haven’t scraped the last deflated bubble of dried milk from the frothing proboscis. (I too, can up with stupid names for ordinary things).

To avert a serious domestic, I promise him I’ll be more respectful of the coffee ritual. I slink back to my sweet warm pudding of a drink and force myself to think sweet warm thoughts about my man.

And then I have another epiphany: Hang on! We’re on the same side! I am once again a coffee addict. That makes me one of the in-crowd. Coffee makes me invincible. It’s time we high-borns showed those ridiculous tea-types who’s boss.