As readers of
this blog may be aware, I do like to reflect on the ordinary moments of eating
today. This is about the mundane, the close at hand, the banal, and all as a
way to help us understand contemporary identity, place, and belonging. In
Perth, the banal often means the suburban, which is the dominant lifestyle
here. The suburbs sprawl from north to south, peeling along the coast for
kilometres on end, hemmed in by the ocean to the west and the scarp to the
east. This is the ordinary as it manifests here.
I think there are
lots of reasons why the close at hand matters. It might not only be the
challenge of thinking about what is immediately around us, but it might also
have to do with what we can afford, the idea of the normal, and the celebration
of those moments that go unnoticed. The glue of life, the substance that binds
it together like flour or egg or sometimes rice, is the everyday, and, it is
worth celebrating for that reason alone.
A lot of my
everyday takes place at a local university, where I do some teaching in an arts
department. I am on campus four days a week, and, besides my desk at home
(where I am writing to you from) it is the place I am most often in. There are
a number of food options that are on campus or nearby, including international
food courts with Japanese, Malaysian (2 kinds), Lebanese, Italian, Chinese,
fish and chips, and, an American burger place; cafes that look out across the
river with birds flocking and boats crowding the immediate view; and there are
places at the university itself. This last group includes a tavern, a number of
food trucks, a couple of student dominated clusters, and, a club for faculty
only. There is also a café at the library, where I often refuel, because of
location and selection.
I will often
catch up with students or staff at the library café, Quobba Gnarning. I do not
drink coffee, and, I usually only have one cup of tea each day. But, I do not
offer that digression up out of piousness, but simply to point out that when I ‘meet
for a coffee’ I am often drinking something else. Quobba Gnarning has recently
put milo on the menu, and, I think my students are pleasantly surprised when
they discover that it is my hot beverage of choice. It helps them comes to
terms with authority, which is, I think, one of the major changes between
school and university. I am not there to discipline them, at least not in the
way they have come to expect, but rather to educate them within a discipline,
which is to say cultivate a way of thinking that comes with a sense of
tradition.
The other day,
there I was catching up with a prospective honours student, having ordered a
milo. In his twenty two year old wisdom, he was having a long mac (no
judgement). And, out of the corner of my eye I spied something that I had not
seen in the cake cabinet before. As you will have guessed, this was a
strawberry lamington. It must be said, that this is not my preferred flavour of
lamington. That would belong to the classic chocolate one, but decked out with
a thin layer cream and raspberry jam in the middle. Nevertheless, I persisted.
I did what any university lecturer, and someone willing to lead by example,
would do. I ordered the strawberry lamington to go with my milo. I had to show
my student what was ahead of him if he continued to study at such a venerable
institution.
The lamington
itself was disappointing – the icing was a little chewy, and not in a desirable
‘this has Q’ kind of way, but more that it had been in the fridge a little
long. The sponge was fair enough and the flavour rock solid gold. It succeeded
in nostalgia factor despite making me a little sick and without the need to get
another one for a long while. And yet, it brought with it a certain comfort, if
not joy, that in the small break in the day one could holiday in the return of
youth and celebrate something so ordinary. That is not a bad outcome for $2.90
not matter the day.
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