Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: coffee

  • wasp joy

    This summer as the world goes to literal and immediate hell using bushfire and corruption, misogyny and greed, several small incidents have surfaced in my own daily life that help keep me afloat. I found a new bar, hidden behind a drift of trees, late last night as I was pedalling home from some arduous and exacting work that never seems to be done. I had passed this place half a hundred times but a man was sitting outside, on a comfy chair, his long legs crossed and his concentration sunk in a book. I went back around and locked my bike and walked inside, rather shyly.

    They had faded couches and long rows of wine boxes lined with glinting bottles. I sat down and took out my book in turn. To be in Berlin, and be not the only person on the train, or in a restaurant, who’s reading. I read for about an hour. It slowly grew dark outside. The bartender came and squatted in front of me: what do you feel like? I’ll make you something nice. She made me something nice, involving cognac and whipped egg white, and I drank it very slowly and then got up and closed my book and went over to the bar. She was rattling ice cubes efficiently in a steel cocktail shaker. Ten euros exactly.

    Oh, then… I gave her the note and held out my palm. Rather than picking through it vaguely to work out what might make a fair tip I would let her choose: so I informed her by my cheeky but underconfident smile. She dug in and showed me what she’d found. “Ich nehm’ ein Euro,” I’ll take one euro. We both smiled and I rode home to the pair of large ears which rise from the arm of the couch these days when I walk in. I have my little familiar, my smallest companion, the cat who was left behind in Brisbane six years back and finally got on a plane. She cheers me, too.

    Today I sat in a quiet streetside cafe under the late summer trees. A leaf drifted by as I rode home last night and it’s unavoidable that winter will come. My subtropical heart quails each time. At the next table a beautiful man was reading. “Can I have your sugar?” I asked, without thinking, and his smile quirked.

    “You can! the only problem is,” he said, in German, “a couple of wasps have been making it pleasant for themselves in there, so… I still took it.”

    I opened the sugar and peered. Three wasps, butts bent up and heads gleefully sunk in the piles of golden sugar, made me laugh. The waitress brought me their largest glass filled to the brim with tap water. A car went past behind me very slowly. The cafe has scalloped blankets folded now over the back of some of the chairs. We will sit outside as long as we can, before it’s so cold and grey we have to turn for home and then never run into each other all the rest of the long Berlin winter, which is deadly low and close to the ground, obscures sun and stars, and lasts eighteen months of the year, I’m convinced of it.

  • our neighbour grief

    Coming past the apartment below me I heard from the stairs the unmistakeable noises of grief.

    Fresh, recent, still shocking grief. It was new, and she was pleading with him. I stood hesitating on the steps. He had just delivered some devastating blow and her voice rose and I heard how clearly everyone must have heard me, all this year while I’ve been grieving.

    I could hear how it hadn’t quite sunk in, she still sounded like it might all go away, if she could reason with him – with death. With Fate. Oh, denial. Your friendly, obtuse embrace, like a bear hug from a family member we don’t quite know well enough and aren’t comfortable with.

    It is autumn and I pass a tree which seems always to be filled with birds. This singing tree is in the street where my former lover lives and which I pass down every week on my way to life drawing. I showed him the tree one day, five years back when we were courting, and remarked what good fortune it made to have a pretty, mop-headed tree shaking its tresses in your own street. “I’ve just never seen it,” he said, looking blankly at the coffee shop beside it where he bought his coffee every morning on his walk.

    That love is in the past now which is the natural goal of everything we have and are. I kept pedalling and a man with golden hair flopping over his face said, Careful there. Your skirt is in the spokes. “That is so love from you,” I said, using the German formulation and the Berlin-informal friendly ‘you’. And he went on with his guitar strapped to his back and then another man passed, riding with his hands folded in the pits under his shoulders and whistling.

    That night I tidied til everything in my house was sweet and in its good order. I chased down the characteristic daddy long legs of my own hair which dance around the corner of any house I ever live in, collecting fragments of dust and leaves which have dropped from the ferns as they dry. I ran a bath, which entails literally running – back and forth with saucepans and kettles filled with hot water from the stovetop to fill the tub. I whipped by hand a stiff batch of Dutch peperkoek, a spiced pepper cake whose batter is so thick you have to drag it with pastry hooks, if you have them. I battered the cardamom pods, the peppercorns, the anise stars, the cloves and the ginger with my pestle and later when I’d subsided into the brimming bath, my legs disappearing in the steam, I rolled fingerwads of peperkoek mix in my mouth thoughtfully, the raw batter, and the spicy sharpness had such fire it stung the insides of my cheeks and my tongue. Outside, the griefs of the world carry on and roll over us as they inevitably will. I’ve had griefs of my own, this year and last year and other times, continuous at some times like the waves that slap the incoming water traffic of the tide as they recede. But in my bathtub there were only the gentlest and the smallest waves, as the world slowly sunk to salt and storms for miles all around.

    For Alison Lambert and her son

  • or anything but

    Two Americans in a coffee shop staffed by Australians. This is Berlin where not everybody bothers to learn German. They come in and order and make themselves comfortable. One starts talking about Sylvia Plath.

    He is reading a book about her life only it’s not very good. “I mean, with Hughes,” he says, sounding oddly over-familiar. They talk about football, which is what everyone is hearing about this week whether they like it or not. Their voices, like the giant screens set up in front of every late night convenience store and in every bar, are loud and blaring. They’ve been raised to expect prizes for participating and the world is their awe, yeah.

    “I’m not patriotic or anything,” the girl says. In my mind I hear: “I’m not racist, or anything, but,” which invariably heralds the most racist remarks. This is my favourite of the yeahbuts, which I pronounce to rhyme with rarebit. Equal favourite is the woeful, “I mean I’m not a feminist or anything, but – ” which, oddly enough, is necessary to preface anti-sexist ideas.

    “I know,” the guy says, quickly. “I’m not patriotic, either.”

    “…But when it comes to football,” he says, ” – I’m strangely patriotic!”

    They laugh, looking away from each other. She confides, “Me too. I just want the little guys to win. I mean, not – win,” she says.

    “No,” he says, “you want them to win.” There is a moment of silence as this sinks in.

    I am writing in a cafe where punks come in to beg from hipsters. Punk is the indigenous nation of Berlin, they built the poor but sexy reputation that has lured all these web designers and makers of cupcakes, now they are thrown out on their own lands and rely on bottle collecting, ingenious begging, ever more resourceful squats. This week I was cycling down a sunny street when a woman accosted me in French. Did I know where there was a squat nearby which she could visit? “You realise these are people’s homes,” I said. “You can’t just go in and… take photographs.” I directed to her to a large, enterprising commune which hosts open air cinema evenings in the warmer months. Her lip curled. “That place… is filled with tourists.”

    This cafe is on a street rapidly filling up with ice cream shops and children’s shoe stores: the twin signs, to my mind, of gentrification. I am part of the problem. But these strange twenty-five-year olds leave me feeling more foreign than any German ever did. They are talking now about their projects, and about some elder expert. “I’m thinking of getting him as my mentor for the project,” she says, as though the famous professor were a new brand of wallpaper. “I think maybe it would be good for me.” As though everything were a new brand of wallpaper. As though wallpaper were a background on one’s sharp black cell phone and would never need to be hung with paper and with sweat and paste, at all.

  • pure new cold all over

    It’s snowing! It’s snowing! It’s snowing! I came into a cafe going, It’s snowing, and she said, I know, and I said, But – it’s snowing! and then hours later walked out into the dark and under the golden lights every car wore a fresh crisp white bonnet, my old tears burst its banks, oh – snow.

    In my cafe two fellows in black beards were drawing at a big round table and as the cafe closed two girls in long tresses came up to say, So? Are you drawing? They looked up, patiently. The girls were pretty and the boys kind. “So do you do this professionally? Or…”

    Ah, yes. That tasteful first question, also asked of every dentist and every builder’s labourer – so how much do you get paid for that? The taller girl plumped her bag down on top of the nearer guy’s paints. She got out her phone. “May I?” Yes, he said, standing back so that she could take a picture of his work. Her friend said, Doesn’t it bother you, working in a cafe? Behind her packing up my laptop and my notebooks I answered for him, only quietly – the only thing that bothers me about working in a cafe is that people come up and interrupt, this has happened to me many times, someone actually waving their hand under my nose to get my attention so that they can say, Doesn’t it bother you working in a place like this, how can you concentrate?

    Coming out into the fresh snow, unexpected and perfectly flawless just yet, I saw a man – let’s say a man – had drawn a huge erect penis on the rump of one of those anointed cars, cos some people don’t understand perfection. I could hear children cluttered round the corner shrieking in their snowsuits, that time of year! is here! so I put down the palm of my hand on someone’s bonnet to make a snow angel of five long fingers, marking: I too see this snowing time of year. This indoor landscape. Domain of families and gold. I too am here.

  • her blonde fall

    Today I pulled my ugg boots out of the back of the closet and yanked them on to walk down to the nearest coffee shop. Under the lowered sky the world feels more like a cave than a palace of splendours. It is cold and what withers my heart is that it will now stay cold here for months. Flowers are still standing on people’s balconies but the sky behind the buildings has soured. My little blue mug marches with me every morning past the Turkish men playing backgammon and the local alcoholics gathering outside the convenience store to drink beer. The prospect of seeing no blue sky nor hearing birdsong til May or even June is so terribly daunting to a tropical heart. It is cold and dim and it’s going to get colder and darker; the ground will freeze solid; the rivers will freeze over; it is going to be cold and dark, always cold, colder and darker and dimmer til Spring.

    The little cafe is brimming with people and music. I used to come in and write here, every day, back in 2012; that was six or seven sublets ago. I am aware as I move out of the way a third time, waiting for the Australian barista to pour, that my order, in Melbourne barista-speak, is a suburban why bother. A cafe owner in Northcote once translated the name to my face, jauntily, making rapid notes, then looked up and saw my eyes had filled with tears of mortification and exclusion. Poor guy. He spent the rest of the morning hustling my friend and me to ever choicer patches of dappled sun and offering us sample cakes and sandwiches. It’s just convenient, he lied, in a fluster. Extra hot is suburban. Decaf is why bother. In a culture which preens itself on hardiness and how many coffees everybody ‘needs’ to get through their demanding day, to drink caffeine free with a scalded milk froth is like walking unemployed into a cocktail party of the leisured, mannered, drunken wealthy and asking for a glass of milk.

    I’ve done that too.

    As the sky closes over our heads we turn within, I guess, a more meditative season. My heart aches after the email from my father today about the cosy family holiday they had, a farmstay with all the little children: like the childhoods we had, on our grandparents’ farm, a place now sold and probably built out. I’m in exile and I can’t go back. But as the natural landscape pleaches us in with its monotones of winter sleep, maybe that of the humans around me will brighten and deepen and welcome me in. The golden daytime candles are sat out on cafe tables already. The smooth endless music rolls forth. There’s the wintry rattle of cars over stones. The changing colours on the market, from bright summer fruits to rich, bruising plums and sprays of spinach, and beets. Two or three weeks ago we cycled miles out of town to a garden party, livid with lanterns. We swam in two lakes and ate breads and preserves our hosts had made, and felt sleepy at table. A large dog thumped her tail under the bench seat. At 2 o’clock in the morning on the quiet train home I lay huddled against the glass divider, replete. A woman got on and plumped herself against the opposite side of the glass. She dropped her head back and sighed. She had a glorious fall of long blonde hair, different colours of blonde, salon tipped, which flattened out against the glass as she took out her phone, compressing like a river of gemstones into one two-dimensional clotted sky after another as she turned her head. I lay sleepy with my face pressed into her hair, but for the glass, and I now recall it: and winter stings me, but there’s always the heaven of us.

  • sugar no sugar

    Pleased as Punch, in that resinous phrase, that in my first days in Spain I worked out how to say, spelling notwithstanding, “Cafe descafinado con leche, por favor – cafe machinata – muy calliente, y con miele.” This is my strenous coffee order, what Melbourne baristas sneeringly call “the why bother” – in order to convey ‘honey’ I first had to mime little fluttering motions with my elbows trapped by my sides, saying repeatedly ‘azucar, non azucar’ (sugar, not sugar)… When I finally spotted a squeezer of honey on the shelf and pointed to it, the assembled staff turned to each other and started mimicking my mime, going, “Ahhhh, *miele*…”

    I love languages but know none apart from German, decayed Bahasa Indonesia, and some shreds of truly pathetic French. But Spanish is glorious. I learned yesterday from some friends who run a bookshop that ‘vacuum cleaner’ is, in English translation, ‘the aspirator’ – that which inhales everything. But let’s not get too carried away – to use that other, far less celebratory phrase: as far as I’m concerned, Nature abhors a vacuum. And I’m with Nature.

  • Kaffeewitzenkraft

    We tried out a new coffee house, on our bicycles. Actually it was an old cafe, one of Brisbane’s earliest, in a dingy nook at the entrance to the gold-crusted cinemas on Queen Street. However it’s been done up like an ageing aunt, trussed in striped golden paper and with those little dinky tables too small to spread a newspaper. He ordered his coffee and I ordered mine. I was put off by the newly-renovated smell but rooted to the spot by the Abba album they were playing – the actual album, the whole thing, the impeccable swirling piano and harmonies. We stayed to listen.

    One coffee seems never enough. I’ve fallen into the maw of first world greed. I stood up and wound my way back to the counter, the guy pouring showy, almost effortless lattes one after another. He had an Olympic flag of empty white-mouthed cups and was swirling them full rapidly. Another coffee? he asked, seeing me standing there watching. I said, Yes please. Decaf –

    He finished for me. “Extra extra hot with some honey on the side.” Yes, I said. “And do you want another of the espressos?” No, I said: He hated his.

    I always hold my breath, risking a joke against a stranger. They might not get it. They might decide to stiffen and feel attacked. The last customer might have been horribly rude. He swung away from me to open the till and as he did so, a great guffaw of laughter like a cough came out of him and he fell forward from the waist, laughing luxuriously. Phew. I went back to our tiny table and told my partner, in barista world my kind of coffee would be “a suburban why-bother.”

  • coffee name

    On the markets I ordered a cup of coffee under canvas, under trees. The fig trees in Brisbane are extraordinarily broad and they spread lumpy dragon roots as well as branches. “What name shall I put that under?” he wanted to know, and I said, “Toby.” The man looked me over thoughtfully. His eyes were bright and shrewd, his face seamed and gnomish. “Toby,” he said, almost spelling it out, as he wrote it down letter by letter. “That’s my coffee name,” I confided. He let out a shout of laughter. “That’s a good one!” “Uh, thanks,” I said. He said, “See, I’m retiring, and today is my last day.” “Oh, well!” I said, brightening. “In that case, congratulations on a working life well spent, I have no doubt. Here, let me shake your hand.” I stuck out my hand and we shook. He explained, “It’s just that it’s so great for something completely new and fresh to happen on the last day. I was not expecting that.” “My name’s hard to spell,” I told him, “it’s Cathoel, and I don’t like being called Cath. So if you had hollered out ‘coffee for Cath!’ that would have pissed me off.” He was laughing again. “Thanks, Cathoel. I’m so glad you showed up on my very last day.”

  • that lamp

    I have a lamp that is shaped like a shell, was in fact a shell, is a home for a strange and retiring sea creature long now gone. It glows almost red when you plug in the bulb, a beloved’s ear with light behind it. Lately as the days are tropical cold and dim and windy we light the lamps tagsüber. Near the beer factory is a tiny art printer who lays on canvas and on fine rag paper people’s photographs and paintings. We left the lamp on at home and went out. He showed me some of his work. He opened a drawer and let me roll some of the beautiful paper in my hands.

    Nearby is a tucked-in kind of cafe which you can barely see from the road, it is screened. Inside is like a secret fish tank. The chalkboard says You like cake. We make cake. Cake CAKE. We ordered cake. “Eighteen fifty,” said the guy. Cake is expensive. I said, “Now that was a very good year.” “Huh,” he said. We sat down and went over the book I am bringing to print this week: page after page of it, is it still beautiful, does it still hold. You’re looking for the tiny cracks and nail holes that let seep gradually the water. At the far end of the place a handsome man lay back in his chair. Stroking lazily his little device. He didn’t lift his eyes off it. His daughter dressed from head to toe in pink ballerina costume lay in a pile on the concrete playing dreamily with blocks they have stacked down there, singing and rousing on herself. She was in her own world, he was in someone else’s. Two men came into the cafe and I heard the guy recycling my pale joke. “19.90,” he said, “now there’s a good year. You’d be finished school, out into the world…” Behind my back I could almost hear them gazing at him blankly. I felt bad about the failure of the wordplay I’d transmitted, as though I had set him up.

    Later the night turned out fresh and enchanted, so strange, those nights that bring home the spirits from the deep sea and the mountainside. I lay in the hammock between two large trees, watching as the wind rustled and tumbled like cities through surf, down to the bony ground again and again, carrying in itself everything whole and real, everything breathing. This month I don’t know if you’ve noticed but again the full moon was full or albert full for days and days. This always feels like some kind of special benediction to me, as though we have been given a treat, like we have pulled off a trick somehow and gotten away with something.

    I should end there but there is something more to say. You know the night? In the night if you lie in a hammock you are in the air, you’re in the water. I gazed up, mostly with my eyes closed, into the depths of the tree, the sparring webwork of the lazing bed, the night itself drawing its fleece across the stars. It felt like one of those nights you could climb up into, curled as I lay curled, and the night would heal itself round you seamlessly and simply carry you away.

    When I came in my partner called me over to his screen. He loves the new. He wanted to play me a piece of music, piano music. We were silent, listening to the climbing sounds. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Yes, I said, it’s beautiful. He said, “It’s the first piece of music not composed by human~” “What?” I stood up. I think I was shouting. “Why did you play me this? Why did you?” “What’s the matter?” “Why do you show me this stuff?” “I thought it would make you feel good! It’s not scary, it’s just beautiful. Listen how lovely that is.” When someone who understands doesn’t understand: the world is a cyborg desert already. I said, “I can’t take it. I can’t live in a world where machines compose music. I can’t live.” An ache spread inside my chest, despair, hopelessness, rage. Within me I felt the impaired moon, the night, the thoughts of serene pursuit drain like soap scum away. Poke the pearls and they are merely bubbles, evaporating, the >plink<. Someone let the plug out of the sky and I felt all the buoyancy of things drag slowly down, my heart is hot and sore and sleep seems more oblivion than restorative hammock in a sea of quiet leaves which sparkle like near stars.

  • a strange moustache

    Lady Barista and I made each other laugh today, or maybe I just made myself laugh, which is lamer but still enjoyable. I turned up with my curly-handed mug and passed it across. “Just the uzh?” she said, which is her uzhual question. I was reading the band posters behind her. “Oh! I’m performing in that!” “What?” she said. “Queensland Poetry Festival. We have this fantasy that my poetry book & my CD will be out by that time but I think…. it’s not going to be both.” She picked up my loyalty card and said, “Hey! You’ve got a free one here.” Instead of throwing the full card away she passed it back. “You should keep that.” It had a bright yellow postage sticker on it, for tracking an overnight bag. “Ok,” I said, “but I think you better stamp it anyway. Just in case I try to come back and claim that free coffee again.” She said, dryly, “I think I might recognise you.” I said, “Wearing a fake moustache.” We started to laugh. “Dark glasses,” she said. She said, “I think the cup might give it away.” I was lying on the counter, laughing. “So if someone turns up,” I gasped, “in a plastic moustache – and a big hat – and dark glasses… and a shonky foreign accent – ‘Chello. Do you haff ze decaf?’ – I have to confess that might be me.”