Searching for fulfilment abroad
In this strange rag-tag journey we all share, the goal can change like clouds in your coffee.
If you’re fully engaged with the roaring stream of life and you’re not an Olympic torpedo or a US presidential candidate — the steely purpose you had when it all started can, and probably should, turn to froth when a better option turns up.
For instance, I recently travelled 20 000 km to find my mother’s birthplace, but in the end I discovered that what I was really searching for, was a decent cup of coffee.
I had been told my Scottish mother was born in a farmhouse in the village of Lasswade south of Edinburgh as World War I raged further south across the water.
Thanks to Google maps I had tracked photos of the old cottage hewn from Midlothian sandstone and covered in ivy.
It was still a working farm, and the photo showed the building rising from a sea of wheat and suitably bathed in the golden evening light of nostalgia.
So I set off for Tullamarine Airport in the dark hours of an approaching Melbourne winter with a suitcase packed with frayed socks and a head full of equally holey dreams.
In the wee hours at an airport cafe, I sipped what was to become the last decent latte for six weeks.
In the white glare of Dubai I asked for a latte and got warm f lavoured milk.
I expected better in Rome, but got a cappuccino topped with a sculptural creation of air and sugar.
I decided to change my order to a f lat white, but then got steamed milk with no foam.
In a little village in the Abruzzi mountains I found a place that served something approaching the perfection of an Australian latte — but you had to ask for an Americaino Machiatto without steamed milk. In Italian. It came in a tall glass with a tiny handle that made it impossible to sip without sticking a little finger out sideways and looking like an art critic.
Perhaps that was the intention.
In Marseille it was the same — flavoured milk or black hot water.
In Paris it was Gitainef lavoured milk with froth.
London came close to a decent Lygon St latte, but not quite.
I travelled through Wales, Yorkshire and up to the north of Scotland and it was the same — flavoured milk and froth.
On the way I stopped in Midlothian, found the old sandstone farmhouse and took some photos.
I felt like an annoying tourist or an undercover tax inspector as I peered into windows through a zoom camera lens as farmworkers went about their farmwork.
I was actually wallowing in hand-me-down stories of my mother’s birth during a Scottish winter and being placed in a shoebox by the fire for warmth.
I headed back down over the border to the land of the Sassenachs and came to rest in a windy little seaside town I have talked about before — Burnham-on-Sea.
And blow me down — it was here in the street of seagulls and sand that I found a cafe called Calm, which served the best coffee outside Australia.
You had to ask for a flat white, but what you got matched the best that Melbourne and Shepparton has to offer.
In a proper coffee glass, too.
Later I told my brother that I had visited our mum’s old farmhouse in Lasswade where she was born.
He told me she wasn’t born there at all, but in another farmhouse about 50 miles north in a place called Kinochtry.
So I returned with photos of a nice but completely meaningless Scottish farmhouse and the precious memory of a place where they serve a perfect coffee.
I often think of the little seaside cafe when I sit in my favourite Shepparton coffee houses.
I have indeed arrived where I started, and I’m starting to know the place for the first time.