The Inspector-General of Misconception

by Frank Moorhouse

  The response to the table attendant is this: In your mind play a favourite piece of music and with your index finger conduct that piece of music.

  Forget about the Christmas cracker

  Unless the restaurant is particularly sensitive and removes it, you will find at the place setting a Christmas cracker.

  Do not under any circumstances pull it yourself.

  Don’t.

  We suggest a prop

  The lone Christmas diner requires a ploy which will go some way to blocking the pitying curiosity of Normal Society there in the restaurant.

  The much revered late Professor Henry Mayer used the best restaurants in the city to dine alone to mark student examination papers.

  That, of course, is the perfect excuse for solitary dining but not on Christmas Day. The Mayer ploy is, therefore, not recommended.

  Reading is essential or morbidity will surely creep in.

  However, reading seems to others to be a transparently sad cover for loneliness. We have a suggestion: The reading matter, book or magazine, or whatever, can be concealed within an official governmental binder which will imply an urgent state duty which cannot pause to acknowledge public holidays or the birth of Christ.

  There is another ploy for introducing a book to the table.

  Have your choice of book pre-wrapped as a Christmas present, with a card attached, and carry it under your arm as you enter the restaurant.

  Make sure the maître d’ sees it and then, when the table attendant is there, read the card, exclaim with pleasure, noisily unwrap the book, and ask the table attendant to take away the expensive wrapping paper, ribbons and bows.

  The fake present will also create the impression that you have a friend somewhere out there.

  If you wish, for the hell of it, you could inscribe the card with something along the lines of, ‘No one could have greater admiration or affection for any living person than that I, and many, many others throughout the world hold for you, the true and living Braveheart. Signed: Mel Gibson, or whoever.

  Show the card casually to the table attendant with the comment, ‘Mel is a very dear person.’

  It will help reduce the pity.

  Make sure Mel isn’t in the restaurant.

  Why pornography is not appropriate

  If you must read and do not wish to carry out either the Official Binder or the False Gift stratagems, we have only one other word of advice.

  It is unacceptable to read pornography in a restaurant for a number of reasons, and not only on Christmas Day.

  If the pornography is in any way efficacious, the lone diner will find themselves aroused in a situation where relief of that arousal is not readily at hand, so to speak.

  Combined with the loosening effects of alcohol, it can lead to advances being made to diners at other tables by the sending of importuning notes, flowers (purloined from the table decoration), business cards, or by gestures and antics which will surely be regretted the next morning.

  Likewise, it can lead to Servant Love (for a fuller discussion of this subject see Loose Living by Frank Moorhouse).

  Falling in love with servants, the seeking of affection from among service people – flight attendants, bank clerks, bar staff, doctors, dentists, nurses and so on – is socially acceptable if safeguarded by strategic and judicious consideration.

  There are unique disillusionments in such encounters.

  We are reminded of the film Wrestling Ernest Hemingway where Walter, a diner, falls in love with Elaine, his waitress.

  He finally visits her in her home and meets her for the first time out of her waitress uniform.

  He says, with disappointment, that she looks ‘different’.

  ‘I’m not in that dreadful uniform,’ she says.

  ‘Oh,’ says Walter, regretfully, ‘it wasn’t so bad.’

  But the life rule is that one should take and give fondness, or anything resembling fondness, wherever you find it in life.

  A further reason for not reading pornography while dining alone in a restaurant is that it could inflame the passions of the table attendants who inevitably have a glance at what you are reading, and they will not be able to carry out their work calmly.

  They will become fixated on your table and neglect other tables.

  They will visibly tremble when delivering dishes to your table.

  They will become flushed and their conversation will be breathless.

  Their dress will become dishevelled and their conduct increasingly lewd.

  We remarked earlier that all forays into Servant Love require judicious and sensitive assessments both of feelings and the methods for showing those feelings. The displaying of dirty pictures on the restaurant table is not considered to be sufficiently prudent or circumspect.

  On being traced by a relative

  If, on Christmas Day, relatives come looking for you and manage to trace you to the restaurant, the only response is to say:

  On evil days though fall’n, and evil tongues I hear

  In darkness, and with dangers encompassing me around,

  In solitude; yet not alone, while thou

  Visit’st my slumbers nightly, or when morn

  Purples the east: still govern though my song,

  Urania, and fit audience find, though few:

  But drive far off the barb’rous dissonance

  Of Bacchus and his revellers.

  Adding, sotto voce, ‘Bacchus, you may stay’.

  This will usually work.

  Your relatives will wish you well in the coming years, shake your hand, and back away out of the restaurant, giving you one last glance and a nervous wave.

  You may never see them again.

  On abundance and its converse

  Lone dining permits you to order idiosyncratically.

  Consequently, you do not have to follow the traditional Christmas menu although restaurants often find this annoying, if not sacrilegious.

  You may, for example, order three or four entrées (presumably, without requiring a main course) or two or three main courses, in entrée size; or, you may leave some of each dish uneaten.

  Or you may order two or three desserts. Or you may challenge tradition by choosing to begin the meal with dessert.

  While abundance and idiosyncrasy may be the whimsical freedoms of eating alone, paradoxically, it also allows for delicacy of pleasure; it invites minute attention to the art of eating.

  Hence, one of the pleasures of solitary eating is that you can painstakingly and deliberately ‘assemble’ a forkful of food.

  Whereas, when one is eating in company, conversation and other matters distract our attention from the making of a forkful and it tends to be done habitually, without thought.

  However, be careful that you do not take too long over the construction of the forkfuls and in contemplation of them.

  Studied attention to a forkful of food will eventually attract worried attention. Even clinical attention.

  On knowing the path of intoxication

  Do not have more than two pre-dinner drinks.

  This is a snare called Drinking for Two which is a disorder which comes from imagining that you have a companion, or, that you are the companion.

  It can only lead to early garrulousness which, in the absence of company, will very likely be vented on the table attendant.

  Or it will lead to talking to oneself. Or to the imaginary companion.

  Nor should you drink the house wine by the glass.

  This is an indication of gastronomic apathy. Buy a half bottle of excellent wine or better still, buy the Whole Damn Bottle.

  The buying of a whole bottle does not require that you drink the whole bottle. Mother’s Rule of eating everything on your plate does not apply to alcohol. It means that you can have as much of it as you feel like, when you like, without having to be forever waving your empty glass at the distant table attendant who is practising avoidance technique.

  The wine which is left at the end
of the evening can be a gift to another lone diner, or to a merry table there in the restaurant, or even to the staff.

  Or you could carry it out with you, swinging it by the neck.

  Knowing the Path of Intoxication: There is a very old saying that the first drink is to revive (that is, to revive the mind and body from the ordeals of the day), the second glass is for merriment, the third is for temptation, the fourth is for folly.

  The drink to revive requires no comment, except that it sometimes requires more than one drink to take the sting out of the day. Merriment – merriment can be inward and does not demand company; one can silently recall merry times, strange things, or allow the mind to play. This, too, may require more than one drink.

  The third drink – for temptation – also sometimes requires an accompanying drink for this tantalising state to be reached. The state of temptation does not have to be satisfied immediately upon the conceiving of the temptation.

  The temptation may be savoured and reflected upon and contrived, and plotted. All of these aspects of temptation can be enjoyed fully when alone.

  Temptation is, though, best acted upon that night while the temptation and the night are lush, and while one is momentarily freed of the restraints of decorum.

  The final part of the old saying – the fourth drink is for folly – is rather ambiguous. Does it mean that this drink is the golden key to delightful foolishness or is it a caution? We have never been able to determine this.

  The fulfilment of the temptation may in retrospect be seen as folly. But it is a happy fact that being alone in one’s intoxication does not offer much possibility for excruciating folly.

  Both temptation and folly, though, should be satisfied away from the restaurant.

  Weeping and inaudible sobbing

  It is always permissible to weep when dining alone at Christmas. Or, for that matter, on any other lone-dining occasion.

  One does not, of course, weep in front of staff unless it is an honest revealing of self during a Servant Love courtship.

  But to weep during a meal in a public place, unhampered by a solicitous companion, can relieve the soul mightily. It allows for pure and immoderate self-pity.

  One can shield the face with the napkin or by turning away or by using the ‘jolly’ paper hat which was given you when you arrived (be careful, the dye from the hat will run. You may look like Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice except that your hair will be orange or pink).

  One cannot, of course, howl but it is possible to sob inaudibly.

  The unspoken indictment of the bill

  Now the arrival of the bill. The problem with the bill is that it seems to any sane observer, such as a table attendant, to be a monumental act of narcissistic self-indulgence. You may see an expression on the table attendant’s face which says what-manner-of-self-centred-person spends $176 dollars on a meal for themselves on Christ’s birthday?

  This expression can be removed by a heavy tip.

  Then leave with dignity, but do not forget that your temptation and your folly still lie, immediately ahead.

  COFFEE AND THE NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY: A CURSORY EXAMINATION

  We can look at a coffee pot and be reminded of the sort of Australia it was that owned it.

  Australia has had percolators of many sorts, dripolators of many sorts, plungers – cafetières – of many designs; many sizes of the round, turn-upside-down Neapolitan gravity dripolators; many sizes of the Milano coffee-maker, with the two eight-sided sections which screw together with a slightly cinched waist at the coffee basket.

  During the Vietnam War, we were given a Vietnamese dripolator made from the aluminium frame of a US aircraft shot down by the Viet Cong. We found it too morbid to use.

  However, here at The Office, we think we have reached the end of one of life’s long journeys – the journey towards the perfect cup of coffee and the perfect milk steamer made by the most perfect-looking coffee-maker.

  We now own, at great expense, an original 1940s Atomic Espresso Coffee Maker.

  The Atomic is a chrome, muscular-looking coffee-maker with an elegant, plump arm which curves up purposefully from a round base and holds the coffee basket in its plump hand.

  The New York Museum of Modern Art has an Atomic in its collection of great designs of the twentieth century.

  The name is from those more optimistic times when the word ‘Atomic’ was filled with scientific promise of infinite technological possibility.

  The Atomic, which has been out of manufacture for a few years, is at present one of the most desired coffee-makers and is to be found only in expensive antique shops.

  They are about to be manufactured again because of world-wide lust for the machines.

  Ownership of the Atomic entitles us to join the Society of Atomic Espresso Coffee Makers.

  We have monthly meetings where we ‘campaign’ the gleaming machines, displaying them on velvet-covered trolleys, back and forth before the judges.

  We have tournaments to see who can make the thickest frothed milk or the best cafe latté.

  We have lectures on the molecular structure of steam.

  We compare the different models and argue their merits.

  Once a year, we have a national rally, often travelling thousands of kilometres with our Atomics, in special soft leather carrying bags, cradled on our laps.

  There are plans for an Atomic Olympics to be held in Rome.

  We remember, as a child, coming across coffee for the first time after one of mother’s Afternoon Teas – ah, the days of the elaborate Afternoon Tea.

  We lived in a country town, and in those times a woman didn’t ‘do lunch’ she ‘gave an afternoon tea’ for friends.

  The story of the Afternoon Tea is that sometime in the nineteenth century, the Seventh Duchess of Bedford grew impatient with the ‘sinking feeling’ which afflicted her around 4 pm. Or was it Queen Alexandra, ‘Her Royal Sweetness’, who created it? Never mind.

  One or the other, tired of ‘the sinking feeling’, called down for a tray of tea, bread and butter, and cake to be brought to her room.

  The practice spread among her friends and then to the public at large.

  Mmmm. Oh well, everything had to start somewhere.

  Although it seems to us that it was a rather obvious idea which many people could have come up with all on their own without the Duchess or the Queen to lead them. Such was the nature of legends in pre-republican times that all things of value began in the magical rooms of the aristocracy and moved ‘down’.

  Towards the end of the century, afternoon tea gowns appeared together with china, specialised furniture, and other afternoon tea accoutrements such as the cake fork.

  Nests of tables were created to hold the cup of tea, and cake plate and fork of the guests who sat in the lounge room.

  It was also called an ‘At Home’ (but not in the town where we grew up) and customarily took place between 3–5 pm.

  In Australia, the hostess sometimes offered a musical performance by herself or by one of the guests who was ‘prevailed upon’ to sing or play the piano or whatever.

  It was acceptable to do knitting or needlework at Afternoon Tea, though preferably for a good cause such as the Red Cross.

  At an Afternoon Tea, our mother offered sandwiches, scones, cakes, sausage rolls and ‘savouries’ – cheddar cheese cubes and small, sweet, coloured onions on toothpicks on savoury holders including one which we especially liked, a small wooden rocking horse.

  They were served on afternoon tea ‘sets’ – matching cup, saucer and plate, with a cake fork.

  It was after such an occasion that, as a small child, we came across a black liquid left in the cups which we had not seen, tasted or smelled before. It was coffee (it hadn’t been available during the war).

  We shudder at some of the experimenting that we did as a child. The leftover things we tasted, including alcohol, or touched, or, in the case of my mother’s wardrobe, ‘tried on’ would have shocked (would st
ill shock).

  And could’ve had us killed.

  Could’ve had us arrested.

  As we write, we have beside us a half-cup of lukewarm, black coffee and we can find in it that first taste of coffee from our childhood; that bitterness which was on the edge of sweetness and which indeed tastes like a ‘bean’ of some sort.

  Mother percolated her coffee in an aluminium coffee-maker where the boiling water burped noisily into a glass inspection top and then seeped back through the coffee basket to fill the pot with coffee.

  An Afternoon Tea was the only time Mother served coffee. Other than that, we drank tea made in a teapot. Coffee, until ‘instant coffee’ arrived in the sixties, was for special occasions and considered sophisticated and ‘American’, which is comical given how bad their coffee is.

  In the fifties, the Italian espresso bars came to Australia with their lever-forced, compressed steam machines which made this new ‘real’ coffee and a new coffee drink called cappuccino.

  The Australian taste has progressed fashionably over the years from this beginning to the latté, the latté-macchiato, the macchiato, and the Australian ‘double short black’ – the heavy decadent hit.

  It was from one of these new espresso bars that we launched off to our first job interview to be a cadet journalist.

  We think this real, full-shot of caffeine from Italian-made coffee falsely got us the job by temporarily knocking shyness on the head. It must have been a rather garrulous sixteen-year-old who took that interview.

  In adulthood, the worst coffee experience we can recall was while working as a young reporter on the Riverina Express, a country newspaper, where David Gyger, the owner and editor, often exhausted, would make the instant coffee with hot water from the hand-basin tap. The Riverina Espresso.

  As our generation came of age, we were introduced by advertising to instant coffee as a time-saver and which we came, quite rightly, to snobbishly disdain.

  Regardless of arguments over the taste, as with the martini, the pleasure of coffee is in the simple craft ceremony of the ‘making’.