After my walk to Bath along the canal, I ended up on Manvers Street near the station and began heading north. I would meet up with the women when the finished their Jane Austen excursions. I was happy with the coffee shop at 8 Manvers with two very nice ladies who reset the wireless for me so that I could get on. I had several drinks and answered some emails.
Across the shop two ladies with two newborns sat and chatted lazily during the sunny and rainy Bath afternoon. I was facing them but far away. It was a lovely little place with local art hanging on the walls. At one point an elderly man came and stood right by my table and stared at the print on the wall above me. I looked up and smiled, but he paid me no mind. After he walked away, I glanced at the ladies again and this time they were both breast-feeding–at the same time. How does that work, I wondered, you just decide it’s a good time for both of you (or four of you in this case) and open up the gates? I didn’t mention it, but the woman beside me on the Eurostar also took a moment to breast-feed her eight-month old while we talked. I have always admired women who do this. It must take some courage to do what it most natural in a culture that is in many ways offended by the natural. Breast-feeding exists on the seam between the natural and the cultural, or as Levi-Straus would say, between the raw and the cooked. I was pleased that the woman on the train was comfortable enough to feed her child while we talked, and I admired these women who naturally fed their infants while they continued their conversation.
The women in the coffee shop continued chatting as before, and I took a sip of my latte. Suddenly, it tasted different, and I realized I was experiencing a bit of synaesthesia: the confluence of two or more senses, in this case sight and taste. I was looking at breast milk, so I ended up tasting breast milk in my latte: a true latte if you will. I am not going to explain here how I have any idea of what breast milk tastes like, but suffice it to say that I know, and I was tasting it my latte.
Later, I looked up and the ladies were looking at me and talking to me through one of the infants. “Do you like the nice man?” they asked the child. It was looking at me and smiling, so I smiled back. It interests me how people hold conversations with you through their infants or dogs. “How old are you sweetie?” they might say, knowing full well how old their child (or dog) is but ventriloquizing through them to hold a conversation with you. I suppose I can understand it. It makes things a bit easier because you have this buffer between you and the other person. After all you didn’t say the thing, the dog (or child) did, and if anything goes wrong, you can blame it on it. “That’s horrible,” you can say to the child, “very offensive. Please don’t ever say that again to the nice man.” Of course it’s the dogs who can be most offensive when they speak without their ventriloquist. “May I smell your ass,” one might say, or worse–just begin humping a leg.
So I smiled at the nice young women and the infant who was ogling me, and these were the thoughts I had as I sipped my now very different tasting latte on a lovely afternoon in Bath.
