Emperor’s New Clothes

This is either a post about the world changing or about things staying just the same.

On the side of fuzzy familiarity is the breakfast scene. Just Fran Kelly and I, no waiters harbouring nuptial intent hovering about, an opened bottle of Glenlivet in my line of sight, cockatoos squawking, lots of laaa di daaah morning light reflecting off the water and lighting up the buildings across the , comforting low-level domestic squalor, a few cockroaches and yesterday’s paper.

Flicking through the foodie section in order to work out where I need to eat dinner to fit in, I happened upon an article about Kopi Luwak. A cup of coffee for $50?* It must be good. So I read all the way through an article about what is apparently a legitimate contendor for Next Big Thing in the coffee world, kopi luwak beans. Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?, you eagerly inquire.

Kopi Luwak is made from coffee beans that have been eaten and excreted bu the
Asian palm civet, or luwak, a mongoose-like mammal native to the jungles of
South-East Asia. The flesh of the coffee cherry is digested, but the bean
passes through intact and is deposited in piles of scat that are collected by
hand from the jungle floor.

Now my head has been spinning since I returned to Sydney: I’ve been running around like a dervish, sleeping insufficiently, moving boxes and boggling a bit at it all. I might still be able to squeeze a drop of credibility from the excuse that I’m jetlagged ergo confused. All the same, it sounds rather like another hideous joke is being played upon the gourmets. Civets are more closely related to cats but they look like big rats. What we’re talking about here is coffee that has been shat out by a rodent after its digestive system has corroded the fruit. I pride myself on an open-mind and a broad palate. The consumption of post-intestinal coffee beans is, however, a step too far. Enough’s enough.

What did confuse me was that the article was written in such a po-faced manner that I couldn’t quite tell whether the author was taking it seriously or not. Is an article about kopi luwak beans a great prank designed to put the food porn (ah, vice, so nice) into ironic perspective? Or is written to appeal to status hungry Sydneysiders looking to impress their friends and clients with a crazily expensive tipple that doubles as a talking point. Either way, coffee whose first filtration has been through the digestive system of a civet is not on my list for 2008.

* If it costs $50 for a 250mL cup, kopi luwak is more expensive than Glenlivet, most Granges, brachetto, all but the best balsamics and extra-virgin olios, and most snake oils.

The butt end of my days and ways

Here’s the thing with giving up smoking. Everyone tells you how good you
are, how strong-willed, how sensible and decent. But it’s nonsense.
It’s not like that. Giving up on fags is giving up on immortality.
It’s not strong will. It’s the spirit submitting to the body. It’s
the triumph of fear. It’s middle age. Stopping smoking is a
milestone on the road away from golden, fire-breathing youth towards Crown green
bowls. And I knew it. I felt bad. I could breathe but that’s
small recompense.

A.A. Gill, who wrote the above, took up hunting stags in craggy Hebridean terrain when he stopped smoking, a vice which is bad for the stags but not so damaging to the livers. I stopped smoking almost a year ago now, give or take a few puffs, and I’m still looking for the payback vice to balance my life. Vice, I’ve always thought, is kind of nice. One always needs to pursue at least one vice to an immoderate degree, tweaking the utilitarian formula to read something like ‘behaviour which causes the least damage to the fewest number.’ Hunting stags in Scotland is not an option for me and I don’t have a glib single grrl in the city line about hunting stags in the Cross at my fingertips. So, the question is, what is my new vice to be? There is a marathon hazily figuring in my plans for 2009 and a motorbike license to be won in the next fortnight. Credible arguments can be advanced as to the viciousness of long distance running and hooning around the city on a motorbike; certainly neither of these last suggest I’m giving up on immortality quite yet. Still, I’m not sure whether these will provide the masochist thrills and spills that smoking provided for so long, hi-jinks that have been absent from my life for so long.