A Wednesday supper for the regulars
Once in a while the regular guests of the lounge are asked to dine together at one long table. This is a note on the most recent such supper.
One long table in the counter hall
The regulars are not a club, and they would be astonished to be called one. They are simply the people whose names I know without looking at the book. Once a season, on a quiet Wednesday, I ask them to dine together, and Stuart Butler clears the counter hall and sets a single long table down the middle of the room.
This time there were twenty-two of us. A retired schoolmaster sat at one end and a dairy farmer at the other, and in the middle a young couple who had moved to Orbost for the quiet and discovered, to their alarm, that there was a great deal to discuss. Denise Bishop kept the teapots moving, and the conversation did not stop for two hours.
Stuart served pea and ham soup, roast beef with all the trimmings and, to finish, a steamed jam pudding that arrived on its platter to a short, respectful silence. The pudding was, I am told, the best in living memory. Stuart has been asked to keep it on the card, and has said that he will consider it.
What we talked about
The river and the weather
The talk began, as it always does in Orbost, with the river. A man at the far end reported that the flats were green after the last rain, and another said that the creek was running higher than it had in years. Within ten minutes the whole table was discussing drainage with the passion usually reserved for football.
The old company office
The schoolmaster had found a photograph of the building taken when it was new, with the pay window open and a queue of men outside it. He passed it down the table, and for a few minutes nobody spoke. Then someone recognised a grandfather, and the room remembered how to be loud again.
Why I do it
The supper costs the house a little and nobody anything more than the price of their meal. I do it because a venue of this kind needs its regulars to know each other, and because there is no better way to find out what has gone quietly wrong than to sit among the people who would notice. Everyone left content, which is the correct word for tea.