Originally published by The Clifton Courier, June 2, 2021

Ok, so you know now I said I didn’t want to turn this column into a stream of petty hot takes?

Well, can we start that from next week? Because I’ve got something to get off my chest: I don’t think I’ll ever be an electric blanket person.  

I mean, sure, electric blankets are great in theory. You turn them on before you go out and when you get home, you’ve got this toasty warm bed waiting for you. That’s a lovely concept. 

It’s a cold, cold world out there. There are robbers and wolves and icy winds and unexpected puddles and people who will make fun of you for your totally normal amount of throw pillows. And when you have to brave the cruel realities of life, it’s nice to know that an electricity-generated warming embrace will be there for you when you finally make it home.

I recently went on a trip to the Stanthorpe region with some friends, wisely choosing what meteorologists were predicting would be the coldest weekend of the year to visit the coldest part of Queensland. Thankfully the house we booked had a fireplace, lots of extra quilts and an electric blanket on every bed. 

And, yes, Stanthorpe is the kind of place that gets so cold it actually looks cold, but I don’t think the electric blankets were necessary. Because every time I use an electric blanket, I have a terrible night’s sleep. 

Growing up, we weren’t an electric blanket household, so it was always a bit of a novelty when I encountered one. I’d turn it on, expecting to have the most comfortable, warm sleep of my life and was always bitterly disappointed.

Maybe I run too hot. Maybe my internal self-regulation system is out of whack. Maybe I’m just out of whack. But they’re just not for me. 

When you go to bed with an electric blanket, you have to make a choice – you either turn it off when you get into bed or keep it on the whole night. I don’t know if there’s a rule about what you’re supposed to do, you just choose what’s right for you. But I would argue that both choices are wrong. 

Whenever I choose to keep the blanket running, I always wake up hot and clammy after a few hours. I have vague worries that my sweat will seep through the blanket, damage the wiring and electrocute me even though I’d assume the manufacturers of electric blankets would account for the dampness of man in designing the device. It’s like that feeling when you force yourself to sit in a hot bath for too long – you start to wonder if you’re slowly cooking yourself. You’re now wondering if you’d be able to smell your own flesh cooking and whether you’d smell like bacon and there goes your restful night’s sleep. 

The other option is turning the blanket off as you crawl into bed. Sure, you won’t overheat in the middle of the night and there will be no cannibalistic musings, but you’re still in for a rough trot. Because when you go to sleep, you’ll be doing so at a temperature that doesn’t require many layers on top. But that temperature is temporary. Soon you’ll cool off and eventually wake up shivering and cursing yourself for poorly insulating your body from the cold. This could also lead you down a thought path about how even your electric bed warmer won’t keep you warm at night and then you’ll start thinking about the folly of man’s reliance on machines and that will lead you on to your inevitable and inescapable loneliness and, look, no one wants to be thinking about at any hour of the night. 

I’ve been through that and now that I’m of an age where I’m too old to have a quarter-life crisis, I like to think I’ve learned from my experiences. 

So when faced with the option of using an electric blanket, I decided not to switch it on. 

I was very smug when my two other roommates (we may have been fancy enough to go to wineries, but we weren’t too fancy to share rooms) complained about being too warm with their electric blankets. And I quietly and respectfully agreed with them that electric blankets can be a bit much. Not that I’m the kind of person to bang on about my opinions on such matters…

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, May 26, 2021

I try not to take any hardline stances in this column.

I don’t want to alienate people or make them feel like their way of life is wrong. And I don’t want to be using this column as the geyser from which my angry bubbling stream of hot takes spits out. I don’t want to push any agendas – I mean, besides that whole anti-bin-in-the-cupboard thing – I just want to have a harmless little laugh, you know?

But good heavens, I think cafes that don’t have table numbers need to take a good, hard look at themselves. 

I was at a cafe the other day which was very much on the trendy end of the spectrum. It had waffles and fried chicken as a breakfast option, which very much taps into that American comfort food trend that hopefully, for the sake of cholesterol speckled arteries around the country, falls out of favour somewhat soon. It listed a side of chips on the menu as “chippies” instead of just “chips”. It had a well thought out colour scheme so the decor matched the staff’s uniforms – which wasn’t even really a uniform come to think of it. All the staff wore the same shirt, but paired with their own pants to give the impression of being less forced and more individual. This was a venue created with Instagram in mind. It was an aesthetic. In short, this cafe knew exactly what it was doing. 

So when there were no table numbers, it was no accident. It was a deliberate design decision. 

I can understand where they’re coming from. Those standard table numbers on the silvery metal stands can be a little tacky. They’re also very common – every bar and grill has them. And, look, I understand the notion of wanting to be a little bit different from all those other basic cafes – that’s pretty much my whole thing. But, in cafes and in life, going too hard on the “a little bit different” just for the sake of being a little bit different can be just as tacky as being like everyone else. Take, for example, those places that have plastic toys jammed on sticks as their table numbers. They’re a bit of fun I guess, but they’re not everyone’s cup of tea. And this wasn’t the kind of cafe that leaned into that kind of caper. This was the kind of cafe that was serious but approachable but cool. 

So they just went without table numbers.

And, look, that’s fine when you have table service. If you have waiters coming to the table taking your order, bringing your food to you and then taking the eftpos machine to you so you don’t have to ever refer to your table with something as soullessly practical as a number, there’s no need for there to be a public-facing table numbering system. That can be done behind the scenes.

But when you have to go up to the counter to place your order, you have to inform the person behind the cash register where to plonk your food down. There’s got to be some kind of system in place to ensure the food you ordered ends up in your general vicinity, otherwise the wrong person would be given the wrong order and the world would crumble into anarchy. 

So when I went up to order my food, the person behind the counter asked what table I was at. And I blanked. 

I had just been grappling with the extremely taxing mental work of trying to decide what to order for breakfast so my brain had not been taking in my surroundings. And before that I had been chatting to my friends, but I hadn’t committed any of their outfit choices to memory and therefore could not use their fashion decisions as landmarks to direct the cafe worker. 

It made me realise how unobservant I can be. If my friends had been kidnapped and I had to make a missing persons report to the police, I would be of absolutely zero help to them. Here’s how I imagine that would go down: “Uhhh, one was wearing a dress, I think. Both of them were definitely wearing shoes – that I know. Can you just tell the officers to look out for two women who look like nice people?”

Back at the counter, I gestured vaguely in the general direction of the table I came from. Thankfully, one of my friends was wearing a hat, which caught the cafe worker’s eye and gave us a mutual reference point. If it wasn’t for that hat, I could still be there right now.

It was a very inefficient system and, geez, I thought we were better than this. This is a city that’s tipped to host an Olympics, for heavens sake!

Of course, there’s always the possibility that I’m overreacting. Maybe it’s not that big of a deal. Maybe being able to describe your location is a basic skill that most people should possess, especially if you’re someone who has an actual communications degree. Maybe, just maybe, I’m just ranting about something pointless and trivial to distract myself fromthe ache of my own pointless and trivial little existence.

But come on guys, we need table numbers.

* Yes, the title IS a direct quote from the cinematic masterpiece that was Holiday In the Sun. The Olsen Twins will not tolerate line cutters, even if they are Megan Fox.