Table

Forty years ago a table placed on a Melbourne footpath meant only one thing, it was being left out for hard rubbish. The concept that you would sit on a bentwood chair in broad daylight, in full view of everyone, and consume a cup of coffee (with a Florentine confectionery) would have scandalised my Edwardian forebears: “You are drinking? In the street?” They were not puritanical but simply inherited the customs of their English ancestors. In their world eating and drinking was done indoors, even the idea of sneaking a block of chocolate while travelling on public transport was unthinkable. No one ever ate in public.

Melbourne has a noble history of coffee consumption. It was one of the earliest imports. In 1898 Professor Marshall-Hall opened his new Conservatorium of Music in a Coffee Palace on Rathdowne Street. Gaggia machines hissed their way through the 20^th century. In the past ten years the city’s laneways have gone from alternative to mainstream as more get decked out with clubs, tiny shops, and cafes, all in the spirit of historian Weston Bate’s phrase, “essential but unplanned.”  It has been observed that if imports of the coffee bean ceased tomorrow the entire metropolis would suffer a collective nervous breakdown.

It is difficult from memory to say exactly when the first table and chairs were positioned nonchalantly in front of which little café, but I think I recall drinking caffe latte outside Tiamos in Lygon Street Carlton by say 1985. Is that right? It was the most sensible development imaginable, though the upright and competitive stalled progress a while with their rules and regulations for street cafes. Sitting outside is the most obvious thing to do, it is amazing it took so long. Reports of street cafes in earlier times enliven cultural history books, but they are a rare sight, like bohemians at a mayoral ball.

Of course, although Melbourne blithely enjoys its Italian inheritance these days, the phenomenon of the Mediterranean streetscape complete with tables, chairs, a swirl of waiters and a jig of baristas has become well-nigh universal in the big cities of the world. Even London, a place my great-aunts would contemplate with a misplaced nostalgia, they’d never been there, even London is now lined with café tables and the sight of locals warming their stiff upper lips with a scalding cappuccino. They retreat indoors if the wind gets bitter or the Radiohead is too loud, but there is something about Londoners attempting to be continental in public that says the times have changed forever.

Not that all is sweetness and light froth. It was about ten years ago that I first heard of apartments being designed both in the city and the suburbs, without a kitchen. This offended a very basic instinct instilled in me since childhood: the world revolves around the kitchen table. Whether it’s breakfast to start the week, a restorative dinner en famille, or a weekend feast with ten or twenty hoeing in, the kitchen is the centre of life. And I don’t just mean the food but the talk. Half the talk of the world goes on around the kitchen table! Half the things you ever learn in life are heard at the kitchen table. How could you not have a kitchen?

The answer, I was told by someone in the know, is that these apartments are for modern people who eat out. Presumably they are measuring out their lives in coffee spoons on the footpath. But somehow this is not café society in the traditional or fashionable sense, nor is it society in any real sense. It took me back to the only two days I have ever spent in Vienna.

It was winter, so on Day One I visited the Art Museum, spending most of the afternoon with the Spanish Court of Philip IV. The Velasquez portraits take up two rooms: monarchs, queens, princes, infantas. You can sit there for hours until you are, not quite, sitting in Madrid in the 17^th century, with only the soft susurrus of a guard or the Austrian snow outside to remind you that time passes. You have even forgotten about coffee. On Day Two the snow was so heavy that I retreated to a coffee house and witnessed, over the next few hours, what I had always been told. The Viennese have two homes, their apartment and their coffee house. Often their postal address is the coffee house. I set myself up at a side table and, being the pre-email pre-iphone era, started writing letters. I wrote all afternoon. Snow kept falling outside, heavier and heavier. I could have been in a Wallace Stevens poem. Then the locals wandered in and started doing the same thing, sitting at tables, playing chess, writing letters, ordering beers. They all had their own tables and were unlikely to depart anytime soon. Time went on like we were at the Spanish Court of Philip IV and Diego Velasquez needed just a little more space to consider his next touches.

Two thoughts came into my mind: these Viennese all have kitchen tables at home and it is a long time before Melbourne will ever learn the ways of Vienna. For example, although we may sit in the gutter gazing at the stars, if we’re not careful the waiter will whisk away our half-finished macchiato, or stand ominously close with the unsaid wish that we vacate our table now for new patrons. Far better is that long Sunday afternoon with friends and family, where a fresh plunger arrives after the meal and we can reminisce about amazing rooms we have seen in Europe, or ponder how the stern manners of our great-aunts are now the subject of lovable anecdotes.