Back To The Grind

We’ve got a lot to worry about: Peak oil, climate change, Justin Bieber’s sexual orientation… to name but three. Good news though, I can take something off the table and make your day just a little easier. It appears, and thank the higher powers that this is so, that the world-wide pepper-grinder shortage is at an end.


For a while in Sydney we weren’t trusted with our own pepper-grinders anywhere but the most expensive restaurants. Even then it was a bit touch and go - they’d check your credit rating before leaving it on the table. All over town, you’d sit down to your bacon and eggs and be forced to catch the eye of the immaculately drug-addled uni student hanging on to the oversized grinder like a Beefeater to his assault rifle, and then justify your need for the rare and exotic spice with a written essay and requisition order, before the facially pierced buffoon would wave the giant chess piece over your yokes and intone, "There you are… enjoy", as though you’d just been feted by the Three Wise Men.


But I think the bubble must have burst, or else the market‘s collapsed… or the World Crime League’s conspiracy to steal all grinders must have failed, because a few times lately I have reached across the café table, picked up the pepper-grinder sitting there and just used it without thought or incident. No waiters have come rushing across and demanded to know where I got it. No one has gasped, and then behind their hands mentioned to their breakfast date, "Honey, see that guy over there in the twenty-year-old Blur T-Shirt? He just used a pepper grinder."


Nothing like that. It’s all totally normal. They’re just back there, on the table like they’re supposed to be. Next to the salt. I would also like to report to all Sydneysiders, who may have felt they were in danger of losing a hard-won skill, that it’s like riding a bike. You don’t forget how to use one.