Beautiful Things

Sitting in La Chien with the paper and a raspberry muffin, revelling in the cloudy goodness of the day, I overhear several conversations. The first is a serious discussion on single-origin coffee, and how the speaker, in all conscience, can't drink anything else. The second contains the improbable but memorable phrase "I don't do butter"; and the third involves a group of thirty-somethings who manage to sustain a conversation about house prices for as long as it takes me to do the crossword. Everyone is wearing pea coats and there are several designer prams scattered about, not to mention the designer dogs tied up outside.

A mother next to me explains to her friends that she is only dressing her child in organic materials "until at least eighteen months". The refined experiences of these Yarraville aesthetes! The privileged assumptions they make about food, houses, children, clothes!

I haven't worked out what I feel about this lifestyle. I love good, beautiful things; I love these wide autumnal streets, these gleaming cottages with wrought-iron trimmings, the impossibly fabulous food and coffee everywhere, the communal feel created by the sausage sizzle outside the butcher's (no ordinary sausage sizzle, mind you, but cheese-laden kranskies with caramelised onions and chutney. I had one and nearly died of a heart attack laced with gastronomical joy). I love the Makers' Market around the corner, the handmade brooches in every second shop window. There is a film of gorgeousness wrapped around everything.

On closer inspection, it would appear that I love most of the same things as the people in the cafe. But am I an aesthete? I don't think so, because that suggests a conscious pursuit and collection of refined experiences. My origins are at once countrified, bogan-y, and suburbanised; and yet my tastes are my own, arrived at independently. I don't believe I ever once liked a thing because my mother did, or because my friends did. The art, music, books that I love, I love because they are beautiful and speak the language of my heart, even though in the beginning I may not have known who made them, or when, or where. For instance: I remember the first time I ever heard Enya's Watermark. I was in Grade Six and getting a lift home with a family friend. They had the tape playing, and I heard Enya for the first time, and I cried. I was sitting in the back seat with some other kids, and while they were talking I had my ear pressed to the speaker, trying desperately to listen to the strains of Orinoco Flow. At eleven, I'd never listened to the radio or been exposed to popular culture, but I knew, without knowing anything else, that I loved that music. I use this horribly embarrassing example to demonstrate my belief that my tastes are largely uninfluenced by other people. Other, less embarrassing examples: hearing My Friend the Chocolate Cake for the first time at my cousin's house in Adelaide at the age of thirteen; discovering a book of pre-Raphaelite art in the local library at fourteen; reading George MacDonald's Phantastes at about the same age.

I dunno. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I question the motives of some people in chasing after this beautiful lifestyle. Do they truly love the beauty, or are they in it for the show? Yet, before judging (which anyone who knows me knows I do far too often and too well) I had better be careful that I, too, value things in proportion as I ought.