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.

FDR and The Pursuit of Happiness.

The Royal commission into Australian banks and other financial institutions has already revealed a deep seam of corruption running through the top echelons of our largely unregulated Australian money industry. 

No doubt much more corruption and outright daylight robbery will be revealed as the Royal Commission continues probing. It is ordinary citizens who suffer most from the extravagances and unlawful activities of unregulated financial institutions.

The dangers to the ordinary citizens of unregulated financial institutions was foreseen nearly seventy five years ago by President Franklin Roosevelt. Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s great Human Rights plan of 1944 to provide economic security for all, died with him in 1945.

What has happened in Australian banking is the same as the situation in the USA, where a largely unregulated financial system caused the global financial crisis of 2008. The banks of Wall Street virtually control the US legislature and have always firmly resisted any attempts at regulation. They claim that government interference in the banking system smacks of Socialism which is anathema to free enterprise and the free operation of market forces.

Well, in August 2008 we all saw how that ended up. Greed and avarice in the Sub Prime Mortgage markets led to the collapse of Goldman Sachs, Lehmann Brothers, Freddy Mac and the Fanny Mae banks. The crisis quickly escalated to other US banks, eventually sending a tidal wave of financial destruction around the world. The whole world isre still recovering from the effects of that great Global Financial Crisis.

When the crisis of 2008 came, what did those great anti-Socialist protagonists of Free Enterprise, all strongly opposed to any government interference, do?  When all their banking walls came tumbling down, why, of course, they rushed to the government demanding help.

And what a lot of help they called for? $700 billion dollars’ worth of help. It was a classic case of what free marketeers are so prone to do. They capitalise their profits and then, when hard times hit, they get the government to socialise their losses.

When the Bill went to congress to give $700 000 000 000 to the banks, the American people railed and rallied against it. They flooded their congressmen’s offices with protest letters and the bill failed. Undeterred, the powerful bankers went to work on those congressmen, mainly Democrats, who had voted against the bill. Sweeteners were offered and eventually the $700 000 000 000 bill was passed…with no requirements for accountability as to how the money was to be spent. It was an unregulated gift to the banks of $700 000 000 000.

So, it was not surprising that many CEOs and board members of these failed banks awarded themselves payouts of $12 000 000 or so each. Lesser ranked bankers also got large payouts for presiding over the destruction of their own banks.

Many of these bankers made themselves out to be the poor victims of the whole financial mess which they themselves had created. Nobel economist, Joseph Stiglitz, commented at the time, “Indeed, some American financiers were especially harshly criticized for seeming to take the position that they, too, were victims … and it seemed particularly galling that they were continuing to hold a gun to the heads of governments, demanding massive bailouts and threatening economic collapse otherwise. Money was flowing to those who had caused the problem, rather than to the victims.

Worse still, much of the money flowing into the banks to recapitalize them so that they could resume lending, has been flowing out in the form of bonus payments and dividends.

Joseph Stiglitz, Fear and loathing in Davos, The Guardian, February 6, 2009.

Someone who was not afraid to strengthen the role of government in regulating banks and other industries was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32^nd President of the United States of America. Roosevelt had witnessed the terrible ravages caused by the Wall Street stock market crash of 1929 and the misery of the Great Depression of the 1930s. When he came to power in 1933 he successfully introduced his New Deal, which placed government action central to expediting public works and welfare programmes to overcome rampant unemployment and poverty.

Unlike many modern politicians, who never look further than the next election for a quick, cosmetic fix to any problems, Roosevelt was a statesman who thought and acted for the long term greater good of society. In 1944, Roosevelt was burdened down, waging all-out war against Germany, Italy and Japan. However, even amid that great human upheaval, he cast his mind to the problems that would face Americans when the war was over.

In a radio speech to the American people on January 11, 1944, six months before the D-Day landings, Roosevelt delivered what became know as his “Bill of Human Rights” speech. It was a speech that said that the US Constitution guaranteed all citizens the rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. He said that the US Bill of Rights gave individuals certain rights of free speech, free press, trial by jury, etc., which provided for Life and Liberty, but that the citizens’ Pursuit of Happiness was constrained by their lack of economic security.

“It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.

All these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

Roosevelt died in 1945, before the war was won. His second Bill of Rights was never introduced to the Congress. The rights he wanted enshrined to provide protection for Americans against economic forces obstructing their Pursuit of Happiness were never enacted. The financial institutions continued to influence Congress and, in their unregulated way, to curtail the rights of the American citizens to economic security.

Ironically, America’s World War 2 enemies, Germany, Italy, Japan, all finished up with constitutions that upheld Roosevelt’s Human Rights manifesto. The United States, in nobly assisting these defeated enemy nations to form stable governments in peacetime after 1945, ensured that the citizens of those countries would have the economic security to live their lives in the pursuit of happiness. As did the citizens of the Scandinavian countries, which also modelled their governments according to Roosevelt’s Human rights principles.  The United Nations incorporated Roosevelt’s plan into its Charter of Human Rights in 1948.

Meanwhile, since 1945, the US Economic-Industrial complex has argued strenuously against any government regulation. It continued to promote the theory that trickle down economic was good for everyone. This theory holds that if the rich are making money and profits, wealth will trickle down to the rest of society.  Of course, “trickle down” proved especially good for the rich but there is no evidence of wealth trickling down to the poor.

Sadly, these days, our political leaders are far, far below the stature and lack the political vision of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. What a world tragedy that has proved to be. Roosevelt knew the way to economic security for all. The US example and now our own banking  Royal Commission show just how far unregulated financial institutions have led us astray.