Offensive

For my last breakfast in Melbourne, I walked once again down Sydney Road to another one of the functionally infinite number of hipster cafes in Brunswick. It was an exceptionally good breakfast: rye crumpet with slow cooked pork neck, fried egg, caponata and little chunks of fried black pudding.

As I sat outside eating it, an elderly dog, grey around the muzzle, came up to me and gave me magnificently textbook Puppy Dog Eyes, pouring every gram of her being into willing the pork neck off my plate and into her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” her owner said.

“No worries,” I said, since I like dogs and she wasn’t being aggressive.

“She’s just drawn by the smell, since she lives in a no-meat household.”

“Aw, you poor old thing,” I told the dog, meaning “You are an unfortunate animal because you cannot have what you desperately want,”… but of course it came across as, “You are an unfortunate animal because you are living with some sort of insane vegan.”

Oddly enough the owner abruptly stopped speaking to me after that, although the dog came scampering over every time the owner’s back was turned to give me those big liquid brown eyes filled with desperate longing.