Peter Kettle |
I’m sitting at a table for two in the charming Abbotsford Monastery. This is in the PJE – post Jeffrey Epstein – era, so there’s no chance of him materializing and taking an underage nun or two with an accomplice… which puts me at ease.
But not so comfortable when he tries to order coffee.
“What do you get, sir?” (I must look old)
Oh…a coffee to start with…thanks.
“Naturally.” (perhaps the most abused of all contemporary unconscious mouths)
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 is not difficult considering I am largely ignorant of coffee in Melbourne’s extensive terminology.
Look at her blankly.
This is deflating. With a deliberately lethargic attitude, I point to a small mug on the adjacent table…there you go. Fill it with coffee to about an inch from the top and put some milk in a small jug on the side…thanks.
‘So…you want a Long Macchiato, with separate milk?
Strangely enough, I don’t care what you want to call it….
as I just described it.
“Um… in order to place the order in the kitchen, I need to put your order in as one of the types of coffee they deal with… a type of coffee they have a well-known name for.”
Let’s cut to the chase? What I just showed you – described to you – is what I call a Madagascar. So tell them I’d like one Madagascar!
Between you and me, if Gordon Ramsay were here, he’d say, “I want a damn Madagascar… I got that… A damn Madagascar.”
Shockingly French, I’m afraid, that Gordon.
Long pause
‘I think you better go to the kitchen and tell them exactly what you want.
Then there should be no confusion… no mix-up.”
I’m not going to cross it… I’ll stay at my table and watch the live action of the Winter Games in Northern Italy – bee Cortina d’Ampezzo at the moment – is presented by Fox Sports Australia.
An over-enthusiastic young woman and a very cheerful young man continue chatting. They grin – nonsensically – at each other at the end of every bit of their conversation.
On screen, a skier jumps on and off a thin rail about forty feet above the ground. It looks like it’s moving about 60 miles per hour… it’s now shooting off on a trajectory toward the clouds and starting to spin… doing four or five acrobatic turns. A bit like the indoor pool that divers do from a high board during the Summer Olympics. If he gets it wrong on landing, he could be a wreck… hospitalized or much worse.
I hear Ally Langdon: “Incredible, absolutely incredible…it’s a 12 twist with inner stuff…stunning.”
James Bracey intervenes: “He landed on his shin… or is it his spine… at 65 degrees… wonder what penalty the jury will give for that… however, it’s rectified and he gets back up, as we see sprinting towards the next obstacle – it looms like a three-story brick wall… will he overcome it? There are 5 extra points if he doesn’t clear it…
he’s over, unscathed…great…really great.’
Langdon: “How lucky we are James to be sitting here watching all this incredible action before our eyes… our own eyes.”
Bracey: “How lucky, Ally…so lucky indeed.”
The camera switches to an on-site commentator. It’s Todd Woodbridge, who knows a lot about tennis, but next to nothing about skiing and the like. What doesn’t stop him: “So excited right now because in 43 minutes we have an Australian competitor in the Toboggan – er, sorry, Bobsleigh – event… zooming across the compact ice around steeply curved bends at an astonishing speed of 80 miles per hour. That’s why they wear a specially hardened perspex visor. Come off the sled at that speed and your face would be toast!”
Langdon playfully brings her fists down and punches the studio desk: “This is something very special, James. Karl Weissen is only 0.8e of one second outside the champion who completed the course – just a few minutes ago – in 2 minutes and 26.43 seconds. Weissen is a humble qualifier…I shouldn’t say humble, but you know what I mean. Mind-boggling, just mind-blowing.”
Coffee is coming…Thank you.
“Perfect.” (another meaningless term)
Perfect for who, I guess? The chef because he likes to cook it, the waiter because it is easy to pronounce when conveying the message or do they claim to know what it will taste like to the person who is going to eat?
I tell her: What I’d like to know is what it’s like to scream through those corners at death-defying speeds… what do the competitors actually feel? Are they calm, stunned, terrorized, or what?
Waitress: “Why don’t they strap a camera to their face or pants or head or whatever… that would tell us what it’s like… and a microphone, plus maybe a heart monitor.”
Now we might be getting somewhere….
I know Baron Winterbottom will be glued to England. I believe he was a master skier of his generation: too modest to tell me! Wonder what he thinks about it all in his village of Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire, or maybe he’s gotten a ringside seat to the action?
And my friend the Baron, like me, has had only a very superficial and fleeting connection with Jeffrey Epstein – in his case he rightly and courageously told Captain Bob (Maxwell) Foxtrot and Oliver when he worked at Lazard’s investment bank in London in his early days. (In my own case, I co-authored a textbook on urban and regional planning that Captain Bob’s company – Pergamon Press in Oxford – published in the 1970s when his daughter, Ghislaine, was a playful teenager with daydreams unknown to the outside world.
I return to the TV screen: and now we go skating… a delightful Austrian young performer enters the ring with an effortless gliding zigzag and flutter. Dominated by the dead voice of a former competitor on the rink: “She comes in with a butterfly and is moved to a double axel… nicely executed, lands soundly… and now attempts an ambitious Biellmann spin…”
Waitress… could you please turn down the volume on the television. Please… to barely noticeable. I shall have to resort to a bottle of your best brandy if I have to put up with any more of that monotonous, so boring commentary.
“Boring… it’s horrible… absolutely horrible, sir. And besides, I can guess what Sir Gordon Ramsay would say about it!”
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