I’m not at all athletic, I’m uncoordinated, and I don’t especially like sport. But I do go to the gym three or four times a week. I go because it is good for my equilibrium, for my heart and my arteries, and because as much as this shocks the 20-year-old me, I love it. I even, for a little while and after I’d been training seriously for a couple of years, considered becoming a personal trainer. After all, I reasoned, who could possibly make a better trainer than someone who knows what it feels like to be rubbish at nearly all athletic activity? What could be more inspiring than the sight of a trainer who regularly gives herself a black eye at body combat and sprains her nose with a medicine ball?
That was one of my less brilliant ideas and although I did end with a certificate III in personal training, I think the fact that it took me two goes to pass one of the exams says a lot. I just could not get straight in my head the difference between hyper- and hypo-extension.
Anyway, at the gym I do see a personal trainer two mornings a week, this morning being one of this week’s mornings. I’ve been seeing him for about six months now so we’re starting to get to know each other a bit, and we have a bit of chit-chat (but not much because I am usually struggling to breathe and he’s usually trying to encourage me to do things I don’t much want to do at the time he is suggesting I do them). This morning, knowing that I was taking a few days off work while the mister was here, he said, ‘How was your day yesterday?’
‘Yes, good,’ I said, ‘The mister and I went for a walk along the beach and had breakfast on Jetty Road Brighton.’ We have to say Jetty Road, Brighton to distinguish it from Jetty Road, Glenelg. It’s a beachside suburbs thing.
‘Oh, where did you go?’
I told him where we went and he said, ‘But why wouldn’t you go to Cream?’
Turns out that Cream is the place the mister and I had walked past and thought, ‘Well, that’s intriguing, a teensy, tiny place with loud music,’ and then promptly forgot about.
‘You have to go,’ my trainer said. ‘The coffee is ten out of ten. Also they’re really young and they play gangsta rap.’
I didn’t pay much attention to that last bit because Jetty Road, Brighton, a southern suburb of Adelaide is not a place you would normally associate with gangsta rap. Especially on a Tuesday morning.
Anyhoo, I came home from my hour of jump squats and tricep dips and said to the mister, ‘We should go to that place we saw yesterday,’ and it being a beautiful morning we walked along the beach in the direction of Jetty Road, Brighton.
On arrival at Cream we discovered that the cafe was full.
‘You’re full?’ I said.
‘Every morning.’
‘Can we put our names down for a table?’ I knew to say this because I’ve seen it on the movies never thinking I would need to say it at Jetty Road, Brighton.
‘What name shall I put it under?’
‘Tracy.’
He wrote Gracie and I said, ‘No, it’s Tracy. Gracie is the wrong demographic.’
He laughed as if he might be old enough to understand the joke.
‘You get a free coffee for waiting. What would you like?’
Okay, so how weird is that? You stand outside on the footpath and they bring you a free coffee while you wait twenty minutes for a table to buy the thing they’ve already given you for free. Anyway, we stood outside, looking twenty years older than everybody else who was standing outside. My trainer is right about many things and he was one hundred and ten percent correct about this. Ten out of ten for the coffee.
Some interesting things happened while we were waiting for our table, but I don’t really have time to tell you about them.
The food! Oh my goodness, I could not choose. The mister suggested that we could share and I said WTF WE HAVE BEEN MARRIED TWENTY FIVE YEARS AND WHEN HAVE I EVER WANTED TO SHARE MY BREAKFAST and then I refused to tell him what I was going to order. Actually I didn’t tell him much at all because every time I spoke he said, ‘What? Sorry, I can’t hear you.’ On account of he has the hearing of a middle aged man and the gangsta rap was fairly loud, particularly for a Tuesday morning.
I had the stack of hotcakes with maple bacon. In truth, it wasn’t a stack because I chose the ‘one hotcake’ option, and I’m not sure how anyone would eat the ‘three hotcakes’ option. I’m certain that my trainer would not have recommended that as post-workout fuel, but holy moly ravioli it was delicious. The hotcakes were fluffy, the bacon was crisp, the maple was maple. I did have to leave a little bit on the plate, because I could feel a bit of a chemical reaction inside my body as the sugars from the maple began to ferment and joined forces with the weekend’s gin which I think had not entirely diffused. No lies, by the time I finished, my hands were shaking and thank goodness for the sea breeze on the gentle walk home.