Peter Kettle |
I’m sitting at a table for two in the charming Abbotsford Convent. This is in the PJE – post Jeffrey Epstein – era, so there’s no chance of him materialising and whisking off an under-age Nun or two with an accomplice…which puts me at ease.
Not so at ease, though, when attempting to order a coffee.
“What will you be having, Sir?” (I must look ancient)
Oh…a coffee to start with…thanks.
“Of course.” (perhaps the most abused of all the current day unconscious mouthings)
So what will it be then?”
A regular coffee.
“Do you mean a flat white, then…or maybe a Latte…or a Cappuccino…or…”
I feign total ignorance of these variations, which isn’t hard as I am largely ignorant about coffee in Melbourne’s extensive terminology.
Look at her blankly.
This is draining. With a deliberately lethargic pose, I point to a small mug on the adjacent table…you see, like that. Fill it up with coffee to about an inch from the top and put some milk in a small jug on the side…thanks.
“So….you’ll be wanting a Long Macchiato, with separate milk, then?
Oddly enough, I don’t mind what you happen to want to call it….
as I’ve just described it.
“Umm…to put in the order to the kitchen, I have to give your order as one of the types of coffee they deal with…one they have a recognised name for.”
Let’s cut to the chase? What I’ve just shown you – described to you – is what I call a Madagascar. So tell them I’d like a Madagascar!
Between you and me, if Gordon Ramsay were here, he’d say: “I want a Fucking Madagascar…got that…..A Fucking Madagascar.”
Shocking French, I’m afraid, that Gordon.
Long pause
“I think you had better go over to the kitchen and tell them exactly what you want.
Then there should be no confusion…no mix-up”.
I don’t go over…I keep sitting at my table and catch sight of live action in the Winter Games in Northern Italy – at Cortina d’Ampezzo at the moment – being presented by Fox Sports Australia.
An over-excited young woman and a very upbeat young man chatter away. They grin – inanely – at each other at the end of each bit of their chat.
On screen, a skier leaps onto and off a thin rail about twelve feet off high the ground. It seems he’s moving at around 60 mph…he’s now shooting off on a trajectory heading for the clouds and is starting to spin around…does four or five acrobatic twists. Rather like the indoor pool divers off a high board do at the Summer Olympics. If he gets it wrong on landing, could be a wreck…hospitalised or much worse.
I hear Ally Langdon: “Incredible, absolutely incredible…it’s s 12 twirl with inners…stunning.”
James Bracey interjects: “He’s landed on his shin…or is it his spine…at 65 degrees…wonder what penalty the judges will give for that…it’s righted though and he’s up again, as we see sprinting towards the next obstacle – it’s looming as a three storey brick wall…will he surmount it? There’s 5 extra points if he doesn’t scrape it …
he’s over, unscathed…amazing…truly amazing.”
Langdon: “How lucky are we James to be sitting here watching all this incredible action in front of our eyes…our very eyes.”
Bracey: “So lucky, Ally…so very lucky indeed.”
The camera switches to an on-site commentator. It is Todd Woodbridge, who knows a good deal about tennis but next to nothing about skiing and suchlike. Which doesn’t stop him: “So very pumped up right now as in 43 minutes time we’ll have an Australian competitor in the Toboggan – err, sorry, Bobsleigh – event…whizzing on the compacted ice around seriously curved bends at an amazing 80 plus miles an hour. That’s why they wear a specially toughened Perspex visor. Come off the sleigh at that speed and your face would otherwise be toast!”
Langdon is bringing her fists down playfully, striking the studio desk: “This is something quite extra-ordinary, James. Karl Weissen is only 0.8th of a second outside the champion who has completed the course – only a few minutes ago – in 2 minutes, 26.43 seconds. Weissen is a lowly qualifier…I shouldn’t say lowly, but you know what I mean. Staggering, just staggering.”
A coffee arrives…Thanks.
“Perfect.” (another meaningless term)
Perfect for whom, I ponder? The chef because he likes cooking it, the waiter because it’s easy to pronounce when delivering the message or do they claim to know how it will taste to the person who’d be doing the eating ?
I tell her: What I’d like to know is what’s really like screaming around those bends at death defying speeds…what do the competitors actually feel? Are they calm…stupefied…terrorised…or what?
Waitress: “Why don’t they strap a camera onto their face or trousers or head or whatever…that would tell us what it’s like…and a microphone, plus heart monitor maybe.”
Now we might be getting somewhere….
I know that, back in England, Baron Winterbottom will be glued in. I believe he was a master skier of his generation: too modest to tell me! Wonder what he’s making of it all back in his Buckinghamshire village of Aston Clinton, or maybe he has got a ring-side seat by the action?
And my friend the Baron has, like myself, had only the most tangential and fleeting connection with Jeffrey Epstein – in his case, rightly and courageously telling Captain Bob (Maxwell) to Foxtrot and Oliver when working in his early days at Lazard’s merchant bank in London. (In my own case, having co-authored a text book on urban and regional planning that Captain Bob’s company – Pergamon Press at Oxford – published in the 1970s when his daughter, Ghislaine, was a playful teenager with day-dreams unknown to the outside world.
I revert to the TV screen: and now we get ice skating…a delightful Austrian young artiste enters the ring with an effortless gliding zig-zag and flutter. Overlain by the dead voice of a former competitor in the rink: “She enters with a Butterfly and is moves into a Double Axel…nicely executed, lands soundly…and now attempting an ambitious Biellmann Spin…”
Waitress…can you please turn down the volume on the television. Please…right down to barely imperceptible. I shall have to resort to a bottle of your finest brandy if having to endure any more of that monotonous so very dull commentary.
“Dull…it’s atrocious…absolutely atrocious, Sir. And, what’s more, I can guess what Sir Gordon Ramsay would say about it!”