Coffee Love-Hearts as an Epiphenomenon of Care
No Adam Roberts, you can't have it as your prog rock band, it's mine.
My partner in life was born on Valentines Day. It makes it ridiculous to eat out. We have both worked hospo venues on VD and have a heathy disrespect for the other customers on such days anyway. Sheer volume, though, does something. Like wartime surgeons I imagine from ER, the baristas at places like Jackson Dodds in Gilbert Road—Preston, I think it is—work as slowly as they can given the gazillions of coffee hangry cyclists and parents and cyclist parents roaming Melbs like locusts in Lycra, which alliteration I can’t even say on Sunday mornings.
It was at Jackson Dodds the young blokes (they are always young blokes but more on that later) first pored the pour in a way until then I had been impatient with in my professional life. I had seen such pouring as at best a performative swirl and the patterns made as flourishes of a one (bloke) who has so much juice they can tie the cafe latté foam with their tongue, as it were, whose Italianate job title came down to “Gaggia Jockey”. What the Jackson Dodds crew revealed to me, defiant of the red eyes and outstretched hands of mums murmuring macchiato and dads droning doppio, defiant of my own OCD chore timing and prediabetic hangover, it must be admitted, what they personified lord love their drifted soul patches and mullets, was love.
Crema preservation. Cocoa emulsification. Foam prevention or release, as the case may be. All of this I have come to appreciate only after my second tabletop espresso machine and with 25kg of coffee a year roasted for the past half a dozen years. (In case you’re wondering, that’s $0.78 a cup including milk but not power.) Beginning with a Kambrook popcorn machine and a bottomless topless SPC tomato can and a colander my father-in-law gave me as a kit and, since Covid, with a Gene Cafe drum roaster, I have travelled from impatient urban bar worker to rural peasant bourgeoise whose favourite bean is Vietnam Ban Sang is a grade 1, hand sorted and washed Arabica from the North West highlands of Vietnam (because I can’t afford any kind of Cuban, hand sorted or otherwise). Would I, under the guns of Melbourne’s Soviet North, have achieved this insight into the love of Jackson Dodd’s?
It is not a Christian love. If Jesus ever got hopped up on Sulawesi Blue he’d have been even more impatient with the moneylenders and hypocrites, and probably the Greens as well, come to think of it. (I did read somewhere that one of the first uses of coffee in Europe was to fast, make a whole lot of coffee with hashish, dance and whirl, no don’t look it up, stay here and drink this.)
It really isn’t romantic love, never mind the love heart or fern or stars or birdies, or butterflies or whales, or Wangaratta and Wodonga. The barista isn’t mooning after the customers and anyway it’s not a move I’d see today’s young business people make.
It’s an epiphenomenon of the trade. The calling. Brickies have them, launderers (not the money kind, although I expect even cartels have their pink coke packaging or walling enemies into walls moments), cleaners—read Alan Garner’s Stone Book Quartet, which I think is actually an example of such an epiphenomenon itself. For a cook it might be an epiphenom-onion.
Code writers are notorious for such stuff, whole Easter eggs I have seen pop up in board rooms during vital Risk Management and Disaster Recovery presentations. Oops, whole Australian Plate tips Sydney off into the Pacific. Which you might think has brought me to the Software Revolution currently going on in US government departments. But no, I won’t go on about it in this place, now. I will, however, go on about the abstraction from work, its atomisation, which allows us to even consider the acts going on right now as worthwhile. One can only imagine the destruction of government as good when your idea of effort is so removed from the slow pour of the barista and only your hungry eyes matter. A trojan is not an Easter egg, it’s St Valentine’s Day Massacre.
I have an old colleague with no filter. (No, not that one, another one.) Working in IT you get used to the remarks the blokes make, the ones who compare the tumescence of their sports cars or the chairs they have had shipped in with lights and tricorder pockets. But one which has come back to us has been one fellow’s contention that only men can make coffee. What do they do, stir it with their little penises? Is it better to test milk heat with your bollocks? The epiphenomenon of such an imagined world of work is not love. I am not sure what it is. I give you the other kind, which takes its time against the rush and the glowing eyes and forms and tempers the bitterness with milk sugars and tart cocoa, and happy birthday to you.
Sashay for Cath Naturally this cathedral— bark scrolls clatter our steps under arches rushing full of heaven’s woolly caps— as if resuscitating when the work was deathly and this our own nation cracked its sovereignty— doesn’t really care for us especially or how deep underwater we sleep in a horror but after going a ways our hips relearn the time to sashay.
