Rambling Rush: Fashion storm in a tea cup

IT may have been Mahatma Gandhi who said ‘be the change you want to be’.

Some sportsman, who take visualisation techniques very seriously, strive to ‘be the ball’ in big moments.

In the case of Lorraine Lawlor, this should read ‘be the tea cup’.

You see, she is the South Coast Herald’s sub-editor. If you aren’t sure what this is, it basically means she edits all the contributed copy, content such as neighbourhood news, school news, etc.

On top of this she has developed into the newsroom’s unofficial tea and coffee maker, which no one is complaining about.

Some (like yours truly) will occasionally help by filling up the kettle, or getting the milk out of the fridge.

Anyway, after a short break over Christmas and New Year celebrations, it seems she is back with a vengeance.

So much so that she actually came dressed in colours exactly matching the boss’s mug.

It’s one thing wearing the same shirt as your significant other in public (but rather don’t). It’s another dressing the same as your boss’s mug.

Exactly the same. Pink, grey and white bands. Quite uncanny it was.

The irony though, is that the boss (Colleen Haggard) is on leave at the moment, so this moment of severe sycophancy was somewhat wasted, alas.

What’s even worse is that a colleague, who shall remain nameless for now, was using the boss’s mug.

She (okay, it was Judi Davis) had shattered the mug she was using which in fact actually belonged to a former colleague, Mike Fisher.

This was a funny little brown/gold mug with a few chips. Nothing great to look at but somehow tea tasted great from it, or so I am told.

The way tea and coffee mugs are handled in the newsroom is quite fascinating: ‘Mug Wars’ or Days of our Mugs, or The Bold and the Mugs… the list could go on.

For example, one such journalist arrived one morning and could not find her mug. Turns out of the guys from distribution had used it. She was not amused, but the rest of us certainly were.

But getting back to Gandhi. It was he who uttered those words, but he actually said ‘be the change you wish to see in the world’.

Ironically perhaps, Gandhi wrote a chapter in his book, A Key to Health, explaining why tannin, the compound that gives tea its astringency, was bad for human consumption.

He called tea ‘an intoxicant’, in the same class of avoidable substances as tobacco and cacao. (Source: Wikipedia).

Somehow I don’t think is going to stop the Herald staff knocking back copious amounts of the ‘get-me-through-the-day’ beverage.