Friday 10 August 2007

café au lait

I don't drink coffee - ever. Never, ever, ever. Ok, maybe once when I was 19 in Yokohama at a cookie shop. They didn't sell any drinks but did provide free instant coffee so I ended up half filling a plastic cup with coffee, the other half with the contents of a number of mini uht milk containers and heaps of sugar. Needless to say, it tasted dreadful.

Not that I have based my dislike of coffee on this experience alone. I don't actually remember that pivotal moment of tasting coffee and disliking it - perhaps it never happened, just the smell is enough to put me off. I really loathe coffee.

I read something in the Age
the other day which made fun of Australians ordering a larday, that is, a latte when they want a white coffee. That Australians, or at least Melburnians, choose to abbreviate caffe(l)latte doesn't bother me - language works like that, it borrows and adapts - but I personally prefer the French term café au lait. Prefer linguistically that is, wouldn't consider drinking one. Café au lait is also what I would call the colour of the linen that I am using to knit the ballerina top. I'm 52 rows into the back which is halfway before the shoulder shaping starts. I don't think that the current ball will make it that far but I have three (four?) more with which to work. Could the universe and I be in harmony?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm with you on the coffee. Don't drink the stuff and never have. Unlike you I do have a pivotal coffee experience. As the eldest child of three daughters it was my job to make Mum and Dad a tea and coffee on weekend mornings and bring it to them in bed. I think it was a trade-off: they got tea/coffee in bed and we got cartoons. This was the mid-1970s, don't think it would work now! Anyway, dad had instant coffee with two sugars and milk. One day I took a sip before I delivered it to his bedside and I've never had coffee since!