What’s in a break? Farewell Food #1

I went for a meeting with my new boss a few days ago at the coffee shop in the bottom of my new building to discuss my position.

It was very exciting and filled me with much joy.

On leaving the meeting, I walked home slowly wearing my sepia-toned sunglasses and listened to Sarah Blasko. My go to nostalgia duo.

The command of Blasko showed me something powerful, well not powerful per se, but it made me come to a realisation of a daily question that I will never have to ask again working in an office.

What do I want for lunch?

You see, my new building is opposite a hospital and next door to a service station / Hungry Jacks combo, meaning the adjacent food outlets are either hospital cafeteria’s or the most fat-riddled fast-food (yay for hung-over work days!). Delicious…but fat riddled.

I realised that this uninspiring choice, and the fact that I will be sitting on my arse all day, would mean that I would have to start packing delicious, healthy food and I would have to farewell the myriad of options available to me in the CBD.

Over the next few days, I will go out of my way to stop eating left over food from our fridge for lunch (my cost cutting measure), and splurge on all the foods that have had an impact on my breaks while working in my retail hell.

Today, I farewelled Sugar and Spice.

This isn’t out of the ordinary; it is my Cheers, a coffee has been named after me, I have formed friendships with the staff and it is a place I have spent many time with my dear work friends in the three and a half years in my store, there is no other store.

It was introduced to me by Amy-May, my boss, who became one of my best friends, a devout Nigella lover with as off-kilter mental processing capacity as my own. It was there, over Corn toast, that our friendship blossomed and for that, it deserves the most important farewell.

Every day of this final week, I will walk into the shop and buy a slice of corn toast aka the butter sponge and think of all that Sugar and Spice has given me.

It was the home of the old lady from cosmetics discussing her 35 year old haemorrhoid, a result from a 30-hour labour that my friend Liz and I had the horror of overhearing, the joy of crazy chats with Amy-May, the building of a beautiful friendship with my longest serving colleague…and amazingly awesome person Lucie and was the location of the first “tester” date for my partner and I where I sat there, paralysed by nerves until the silence was interrupted by the question,

“So…do you think that all Austen fans automatically love the Brontes?”

Yes, that’s pretty gay…but that is when I knew that I had found my soul mate.

Thank you Sugar and Spice. Farewell!