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.