Coffee drinking as a fashion accessory.

                                             

On March 3, 2016, I wrote a blog entitled “Anyone for Coffee”. The story subsequently appeared in the LIFE section of The Australian Newspaper on April 4, 2016.

In  this story I said that in the 1940s and 50s most Australians drank tea. Of course, all of that changed dramatically in the second half of the twentieth Century. Coffee lounges sprang up.Then came Instant coffee, which not surprisingly, was an instant success. 

These day people pay quite large sums of money purchasing their very own coffee making machines, and the expensive accessories that go with them. Generally, these days at Morning Tea, the drink of choice is not tea, but coffee.

However, it was not until recently that I realised that drinking coffee in public had become a fashion accessory. Of course, back in the 1950s and 60s it was considered the height of bad manners to be walking and eating and drinking at the same time. If you were eating or drinking anything then you had to be sitting down. Not anymore.

 

Last Thursday, Lesley and I went to my granddaughter's  school assembly. It was a music assembly and my granddaughter was playing the recorder. Now parking outside any primary school in the mornings is at a premium, especially on assembly days, so we arrived at the school at 8-00am. The street was deserted and we parked right in front of the school gate. As the assembly did not start till 9-00am we decided to wait for a while in our warm car and listened to our own light classical music playlist on a USB inserted into the car’s sound system.

After about ten minutes, I noticed a young lady walking towards the school. She was sipping coffee as she walked, not from a take away coffee cup, but from a bright red, anodised metal coffee container. I call it a container because it held much more than a single cup of coffee.

 

A few minutes later, a huge 4-wheel drive parked in front of our car. The driver’s door opened. The first thing to come out of the car was a fawn coloured coffee container clutched in  a feminine hand which became an arm which eventually became a young mother. She walked around the car with her coffee container, extracted her three children from the car and proceeded into the school grounds. 

Every few minutes, more young mothers came into view, many of them carrying and sipping from brightly coloured coffee containers.

Lesley and I decided it was time to move to the undercover assembly area to ensure that we got a good seat. 

As I moved into the undercover area, I observed  a gentleman sitting and sipping from an ordinary garden variety coffee cup. “How very twentieth century,” I thought.

 He obviously purchased his coffee at a take-away place en-route to his child’s assembly. It was in stark contrast to the coloured coffee containers that I observed in the hands of many of the mothers and grandmothers in the audience. I even noticed one woman who had a thermos of coffee in the bulky bag she had placed on the seat beside hers, no doubt to save it for a friend or family member. This thermos was not like the usual picnic thermos. It was iridescent pink. It had a stylish brown plastic top that featured a press down button for dispensing coffee into a smaller, but equally tastefully designed coffee container.

For many years I have been used to seeing people, mainly women, sipping water from plastic bottles. Even at symphony concerts  at the Perth Concert Hall I have seen Mosman Park matrons and social dashers from Dalkeith taking a swig from a bottle while keeping their eyes fixed on the orchestra. 

The bottles were like replacement pacifiers, or babies’ dummies, from which they sipped every five minutes or so in fear that they would dehydrate and shrivel up like dried prunes unless they kept flooding their poor, overworked kidneys. Well, incessant water sipping still exists, but sipping coffee from exquiste, fashionable, anodised containers is rapidly overtaking it as the de riguer choice of public drinking.

In the meantime, the music assembly was fantastic. It featured animated dancing, enthusiastic choirs, a skilled string ensemble my granddaughter's tuneful recorder group. Lesley and I were delighted with her performance and thrilled that, at her school, at least, NAPLAN has not killed off the joy that music in schools can bring to even the coldest June morning.

We complimented our granddaughter on her performance and then drove home to enjoy a cup of instant coffee. It may not have been too flash in the fashion accessory stakes, but it was truly refreshing.

    

The Long Good Bye

Well, hello again, Reader. I have been absent from these pages for well over a month. I hope that you did not think that I’d left you forever without saying “Good bye.”

I would never do that. Well, not  intentionally, at least. At my age you never know if that last and unexpected “Good bye” is just lurking around the corner.

Shakespeare’s Juliet told us, and Romeo, that “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” Well, I suppose it is sometimes. It depends who you are saying good bye to. Some people seem to take ages and ages to say good bye. Dame Nellie Melba spent years travelling around saying good bye to everyone…and being paid handsomely to do so. John Farnham has had about three “Good Bye Tours” and no doubt will have a few more.

Some retail outlets are always saying goodbye, but they never do. In 1962, I arrived in London at Charring Cross railway station. It was cold day in February. One of the first things I did was buy a green woollen overcoat from a menswear shop next to Charring Cross. I thought I had purchased a bargain because across the two front windows were signs saying, Closing Down Sale.

In 1983, I was back in London with the beautiful Lesley, and daughters Jane, Sarah and Emily. I took them for a walk down The Strand. There was that menswear shop. It had two big signs saying, Closing Down Sale.

In 1996 Lesley and returned to London and those Closing Down Sales were still there. Now that is a Long Goodbye.

Of course, “good bye” derives from “God be with ye/you (until we meet again).”  In France they say Adieu. I am not good at French. Apart from Oui, Merci, Bridget Bardot, Follies Bergere and Champs Elysee, I am not too strong in the  Parlez vous Francais department. But Adieu means “To God.” So, I guess the French are saying, “I will see again when you/we are with God.” Or maybe, in colloquial French it translates as “Drop dead”. Of course, the French also say, “Au Revoir”, which I am told means “In the future.” So, it is a bit like the Yankee farewell of “See you later” or “I’ll be seeing you”.

Some people take ages to say good bye. In my family it is mainly the ladies who are at fault. If a fault it be, because they seem to quite  enjoy their long good byes. What usually happens is that after an enjoyable social occasion somebody will say, “Oh, well, I suppose we had better  be going.” But nobody moves. They all continue on talking. After a while, someone will stand up causing everyone to rise. Usually, it’s me. Then they start saying goodbye to one another. But they do not go way. They stay, chatting and laughing. By this time, I have said good bye to everybody and make my way to the car. Generally, other males in the gathering do the same. The ladies all stay chatting. Eventually, they wander towards the door and start saying goodbye to each other again. After more goodbyes, the hostess will accompany individual ladies to their cars where they will exchange more good byes before driving off. It is a very protracted business.

Now, I am pretty good at saying good bye, which, as I have noted is quite unusual. When I want to leave, I leave quickly. I usually just say good bye and then I go. I can be even quicker than that. Some years ago, I was the General Manager of the Donnybrook Football Club. Often, I would find myself at the bar at the end of a game or at the end of a meeting. When I indicated that I was going to leave, I would be met with a chorus of “Don’t go, Noel. Have another drink.” Soon a middy of beer would be thrust in my hand and I was trapped into another round of drinking. So, in the finish, I would not say good bye at all. After I had paid for my round of drinks I would just say to my mates that I was going to the toilet. Off I would go. Unlike General MacArthur, I did not return.

I continued this strategy when I was Principal at Three Springs School. One afternoon, as school principal, I was invited to attend the opening of a new bulk handling grain facility between the railway station and the three huge wheat silos that dominate the Three Springs skyline. It was a big affair with some federal and state politicians, all the local Shire Council representatives, several big wigs from Commonwealth Bulk Handling and assorted locals, like me, from the WA Railways, the Agricultural Department, The Public Works Department, senior police officers and various other government departments. 

 

After the many speeches, that extended into the evening, we enjoyed a splendid buffet meal and refreshments. After the meal we all stood around on the well-lit train station, drinking and talking. At some stage of the drinking and talking I employed my strategy of taking an unannounced toilet break and wended my unsteady way home across the railway tracks.

The next day my neighbour informed me that my sudden unannounced good bye had caused  quite a stir. When he noted that I was no longer standing around drinking and talking, he made enquiries of others. It was feared that I had wandered into the darker recesses of the station and had fallen on the railway line or come to some other unfortunate end in the dark and deep recesses of the new bulk handling facility.

 A search was instituted and people set off in all directions to find me. There was about fifteen minutes of searching and the yelling out of my name. After that time, as I had not replied to the yelling and nobody had found my prostrate body anywhere, they started back into the talking and drinking.   

In the meantime, I was safely home in bed, asleep.