The outdoor Café and Covid.

 

If Covid-19 showed up anything it was the plight of people being denied the pleasure of outdoor coffee sipping. Distance keeping and avoiding each other became the norm and even now, dire warnings are still out to keep distance and avoid too much closeness with each other. At one stage last year, High Governmental Officers were toying with the idea banning conjugal cohabitations except between certain hours and within a space not larger than 6 sq meters while wearing special distance measuring guides. Numbers of guests at marriages were restricted to two only, excluding the couple to be married. ( no kissing or exchange of bands)

 

Australia is now threatening its own citizens with jail if they dare to even  think of the  idea of coming back home  from overseas, especially if having stayed in India.  The fear of contact lingers on!  As a compromise the lawmakers have now eased the rule on cafés and outdoor venues. And, boy oh boy, have we welcomed that! All that pent up demand. A torrent of coffee aficionados converging on the outdoor venues, people shouting with joy, dancing on the street.

It wasn’t always like that. After our arrival in 1956, coffee was frowned upon as a brown, filthy and decadent ‘foreign’ habit best left behind with other filth and Euro habits such as the dreaded incursion of strange languages never heard before, and certain foods, garlic and salami to name a couple. Banana sandwiches and cucumber pickle with ham was about as far our culinary courage dared go, with a nice cuppa tea afterwards.

I remember one of the first outdoor cafés to open up in Balmain where we were living from the sixties till the mid nineties.  It wasn’t without controversy. ‘Haven’t people got something better to do do than sit around drinking coffee’? What about pedestrians stumbling over the chairs on the footpath, was another objection’ ? Well, throughout the last few decades coffee drinking at outdoor cafes have been taken on as nowhere else in the world. We need the social aspect of meeting people and talk as much as we need food. Social isolation might have been necessary to avoid Covid-19 but it came at a price. The government is providing hundreds of millions of dollars into mental health care. We are not meant to keep distances and separations from each other. We need closeness, social intercourse and hugs more than ever before. 

Cafes offer us that opportunity to catch up. 

Tags: Balmain, Covid-19