Sunday Lunch (Mapping Madness)

There’s something glorious about a good Sunday lunch. I’ve just had one of the finest imaginable; one so fine that it was not just glorious but also heavenly, as though the whole ceremony was being cheered on by God and a choir of angels.

I was alone for my heavenly lunch, but not alone and sad like a king with a crooked crown and sagging jowls who has realised that for all his wealth and for all the pheasant and suckling pig before him he is still very poor, and not alone and pathetic like a kid in a coloured cone hat with a cake bearing many sparkling sparklers but no mates with whom to share the hilarity of trying to extinguish them – no not like that at all, but rather alone and peaceful like Wills after Burke kicked it or Burke after Wills kicked it or like Jacques Cousteau skin-diving on a pretty average reef as far as reefs go but without the burden of cameras filming him and having to make things seems more exciting than they really actually were. I was just alone and peaceful like that.

So there I was, alone in the sticks, and sitting atop what we in the business of describing landforms might call a spur off the side of a ridge, with spur meaning bit that sticks out as it does in just about any context I can think of the term being used, from riding boots to railway lines. Everywhere else I’d been this ridge had just been a ridge with no spurs but on this lucky day, this Sunday just gone, at precisely lunchtime or at least a time I deemed suitable for the taking of lunch, I lobbed upon a very nice westwards-going spur off the still nice but not quite as nice north-south ridge.

The geologist in me was quick to realise the reason for this spur’s existence, that being the fact that a series of milky quartz veins had burst through the rock in a nice regular pattern and hardened it up so that it was able to resist the blows of nature’s cold chisel while lesser rocks crumbled around it, but the romantic in me tried to push aside the geologist and think of the spur instead as a gift from God to a foot soldier, a loyal subject of His work, not in the sense that I read or follow the Bible at all, but in the sense that I spend my days unravelling the puzzles and vagaries that He created in the rocks on whatever day it was that He made the earth, and I suppose it was the first day when I think about it or else where would the animals have been placed?

It was a nice day in every way, that day. Sunny, Sunday, a sunny-sunny-Sunday I suppose, and just a little bit windy, just enough to rustle a few leaves here and there and provide the odd whoosh or two for excitement but not so windy that my geological maps and instruments were at risk of flight. I don’t know what the temperature was, what the number of degrees above zero degrees I should say it was and frankly I don’t care for the use of such a precise and rigid thing as a number to describe something of intangible beauty. It’s like when I used to ask my mate Clint how deep the water was when we were snorkelling and he’d say it was two Clints or three-and-a-half Clints deep, just to be ambiguous and cheeky – that’s how I feel like being, so let’s just say it was a nice temperature.

So I put my backpack down and got out my matches and shreds of fire-starting toilet paper and set about making a little fire to boil my billy, and was pleased to see that the Blessed Spur was rich with a type of tree I don’t know the name of but which has needles instead of leaves. The dead dry needles were thick on the ground and there’s nothing like a handful of them to get a fire cranking in its early stages so on went a few handfuls and up she went in no time. The good thing about a dry climate is you can get all the wood you need to boil a billy without even moving your feet from the fireside and so it went this day, but bear in mind that when I was in Chile the desert was so dry there was no wood at all and I had to have fruit boxes instead of tea, so there must be some tipping point of dryness where the wood situation starts to sour. The Eastern Goldfields must just be one of the world’s best fire-making joints, where there’s enough rain to grow a fair few trees but little enough that most die pretty quick smart before they get too big and proud.

This day I decided to experiment by placing the billy on a stone right next to the fire, with the stone sort of leaning into the fire a little bit to capture the heat but obviously not leaning so much that the billy might be at risk of toppling in and ruining the whole show. This experiment came about because I’ve been finding it a drag waiting for the billy-by-the-side method and am too risk averse to do the billy-on-the-sticks method which is good for a quick boil but has gone pear on me a good few times when the sticks have burned through and then there’s water in the fire and you have to start from scratch with the billy-by-the-side method and by the time the tea is ready you’re in a heavy rage and in no state to be enjoying tea.

To avoid having to raise the point again later I’ll tell you now that the billy-on-the-rock method didn’t work as well as I thought, maybe because the rock itself is cool and transfers heat slowly, but also maybe because my expectations were too high. Options for the future might be billy-on-the-rock but with the billy sort of overhanging off the rock into the fire, which I think would be an equal or greater risk of catastrophic failure than billy-on-the-sticks, or else billy-on-two-rocks-with-fire-underneath but that sounds like a lot of work for a plain old cup of tea.

I sat and ate my sandwiches once the fire was burning brightly and the stone and billy were correctly positioned downwind of the flames, and to tell you the truth the actual sandwiches of salami, cheese and lettuce on multi-grain bread were the low-point of the whole lunch, their only redeeming feature being the bits of red onion I’d dashed in there on top for something a little bit exotic and Spanish. I was still labouring through a mouthful of the second sandwich, which seemed somehow drier than the first, when the water came to the boil. This was a nice woody spot, as I think I mentioned, so with only a small swivel of my torso I was able to find a long, sturdy stick to lift the billy from the fire towards me without even getting up, and really it was these sorts of small graces that made this particular lunch so exceedingly pleasant and memorable.

I tore open two tea bags and threw in the leaves because that’s the way I like it, just leaves, and I don’t care what anyone says: you can definitely taste the paper and it’s not nice. I’m pretty certain that when Merrill J Fernando started Dilmah and named it after his sons Dilhan and Mahjong or something, he didn’t intend for his customers to be drinking tea and paper but tea only, and that he was forced into offering paper bags by a fickle and coarse Australian market he was determine to crack, and it’s unfortunate that the tea he’s really passionate about now sits in small packets called Premium Range as though drinking good tea is beyond the reach of the ordinary man. He compromised his values for cash, did Merrill J Fernando, and I’m sure he’d admit as much if he were here today and then he’d probably burst into big salty Sri Lankan tears and admit he’s been funding the Tamil Tigers too. Shame, Merrill, shame.

I thought all that about Dilmah while the tea brewed and I was just shaking my head and tut-tutting Merrill J Fernando when I realised that the tea was looking pretty dark and ready for drinking so I spooned in three or four sugars with the little teaspoon I stole from the mess and bent so it fit snugly inside the plastic sugar container I’ve got that fits inside my billy. That’s gonna get me onto The New Inventors, the all-in-one-billy, because you always forget something and this day I’d forgotten my cup and it’s ridiculous how hard it is to find a substitute for a cup in the bush without a damn good whittling blade and a few hours to spare so in the end I drank from the billy, once I’d wiped a section of the lip clean of soot.

Without really meaning to – another of these small graces – I found myself in a comfortable pose with my legs crossed and my back against a smooth tree, looking over the cradled billy, between the needle trees, and out onto the low red plain and salmon gums and blue-green cotton balls of saltbush. Then I entered this sort of rhythmic drinking of the tea where I kept it angled right up to my mouth and would first blow out a full breath into the fluttering tea, then I’d take in a big long breath and slurp the tea right at the end. Only as I savoured and swallowed the tea did I look out on the landscape – all the rest of the time I looked into the billy and admired the deep tannin juice and took care not to disturb the exhausted leaves resting at the bottom. I stared in the billy so long I noticed it was covered in stains and untensil scrapes from countless tea ceremonies and many packets of Mee Goreng noodles and tins of Tom Piper’s mince and vegetables, and I thought I could taste hints of the past in this tea and that maybe, like a good wok, it was benefiting from having never been properly washed.

I was disappointed when the tea ran out because the rhythmic drinking had caused me to become deeply thoughtful and now I had to fall back into regular thought, only I had nothing to worry about because things just got better. I found that by shuffling a bit to the side I could lie down without any bits of dolerite or milky quartz poking me in the back so I dragged my backpack over and put my jacket on top of it for a pillow and reclined back onto the thin cushion of needles, then I looked up at the sky through the needle trees. It was mostly clear but with a few clouds and that caused me to reflect on a book about clouds I read where the author raged against sayings like “blue sky” in a business sense because of the implication that clouds are bad news. On this day the cloud were certainly a welcome addition to the sky and had a pleasing symmetry with the puffs of saltbush on the ground.

It only took a few minutes reflecting on the clouds for the tea to begin pumping around my veins and muscles and vital organs, all of which seemed to expand with every heartbeat. The particular tea I used was Dilmah Extra Strong which I started to think was just plain old Dilmah Regular tea that Merrill J Fernando had cut with Afghani opium shavings to turn fickle customers into lifelong addicts and thereby strengthen the Tamils, because it really felt like champagne was fizzing through my veins and I mean that top-shelf champagne with tiny little bubbles that tickle your mouth. I think I really felt it go through me this time because I wasn’t distracted by the talking and shuffling of an ordinary tea party and it made me think how much more fun a tea party might be on your own, but then that wouldn’t be much of a party so maybe just together with friends but in total silence and with no visual stimuli.

I closed my eyes and lay there for a few minutes and in my mind I wanted to sleep but then the fingers of my right hand started spreading and contracting like a five-tentacled octopus – or pentopus as they are called – which I took as I sign that my body wanted to get up and work, so suddenly I sprung to my feet and strapped all my gear on and lunch was over just like that. I had a smile on my face which was strange because the end of lunch is normally such a drawn out and morbid affair. Once I’d pissed out the fire and taken in the view one more time I strode down the Blessed Spur with purpose to see what rocks were like at the bottom and the whole way down I was singing ABC-123 without really even thinking about it, which I thought Michael Jackson would have appreciated as a greater tribute than anything Sunrise could whip up or any teary rambling I might have left on an online condolence book. I’m pretty sure he and God were looking down from up there, and seeing as neither had visited the Eastern Goldfields they would’ve been a bit perplexed by the speck of khaki staggering and singing down the slope all on his own, but they’d have known from my joyful dodging and weaving and the spring in my step that I was one happy fellow doing something far better than just resting on the day of rest and that’s for sure.