Resistance and Re-enchantment
In Praise of the Thermos Flask
Abstract
This short essay explores the art of living the good life, of how small acts of resistance and re-enchantment can be inspired by a symbolic object - the thermos flask. Internalised as a childhood ‘good object’ that represented happy times- family holidays and mountain walks- the thermos produced ‘good things’ that comforted me; warm nourishing soup and hot sweet tea. It acted as a transitional object when I traveled by train and coach, bridging home and my place of arrival, and it became a lost symbol when consumerism and the cappuccino cult seduced me and millions of others to abandon the flask, and buy a coffee on the go.
COVID-19 lockdown closed the cafes I frequented and a ‘return of the repressed’ occurred. The thermos flask re-emerged and ‘flask-time’ has once again become an important part of my life, in unexpected ways. Flask-time is a special time, a transcendent time beyond ‘ordinary time’. Flask-time bypasses consumerism, connects me to the past, present and future, and emancipates me from patterns I was previously entrapped in. I praise the thermos flask because it engages me in a slower and freer experience, it inspires a micro-resistance to consumer society, and it re-connects me to nature, home-produced food and re-connects me to what it means to live the good life.
In Praise of the Thermos Flask
Wrapping small cold fingers around a hot cup filled with homemade vegetable soup is my earliest recollection of the Thermos flask. Sat with my family huddled together on a windswept beach (Blackpool in October was a family break to visit grandparents), the sweet aroma escaped from the large green flask as the soup was served with homemade brown bread and butter.
Back home in the kitchen, a different flask was used as my Mother’s yogurt maker, following the centuries-old method. Boiled milk was left to cool until body temperature, a finger dipped in the milk was the test. A spoonful of yogurt was stirred into the warm milk from the previous batch, the flask was filled, lid screwed on and 8 hours later the magic had happened. If Jesus did water to wine, then Mum did milk to yogurt. As a child, this small miracle produced a family delight we relished. Chilled yogurt served with a large sprinkle of demerara sugar that glistened and then dissolved into a watery syrup. The brown liquid made patterns on the white yogurt and the sweet taste contrasted beautifully with the sharp tangy live yogurt. From the flask, goodness flowed.
In my teenage life, the flask had different associations. It accompanied me on fishing trips with my older brother or with my friends. I suffered from little patience which made me a poor fisherman but I loved being free from parental control and being in nature with mates fooling around. There was a very particular and unforgettable smell when fishing; a blend of maggots, sandwiches and hot flask tea, combined with the musty smell of a freshwater river or lake. Quickly bored, I would devour all my sandwiches in the first hour, having usually lost my fishing tackle in the weeds, then off exploring and tree climbing returning to finish my hot tea and admire my brother’s catch.
Later, the flask became a transitional object, bridging the gap between home and my travel destinations. It provided the wake-up coffee on my weekly train journey to London to study for a Master’s degree. My garden was next to the railway and Fynn, my young son, would stand on a chair looking over the hedge, waving and hoping to spot me as the train sped past. I would lean out of the train window waving back madly and catching his grin, before sitting back in my seat, opening the flask, and smelling the hot coffee that accompanied the cheese and chutney sandwiches I pulled from my bag. The flask became the connection that would nourish me between the home I left and the bustling, dynamic city that greeted me at Euston Station. It also became my walking companion, as I ventured into the mountains of the Lake District and Wales, and on our epic journey across the length of the United Kingdom, from John O Groats to Land’s End. Our lunch breaks and coffee breaks took place in beautiful landscapes, whether in bright sunshine or huddled against the wind and rain, the flask was at the heart of the action, in a similar way that a fireplace is the warming hearth of a home.
In my younger adult life, coffee, sandwiches and cakes from cafés and train buffet bars were an exception, an expense beyond my budget. Aside from the economics, the flask also became an object of micro-resistance to the onslaught of the consumerist world that was devouring everything in its way, and in the process transforming our desires and our lives.
The rise of the ‘Cappuccino Cult’
The flask as a travel companion slowly became redundant as it was replaced by paper cups of tea and coffee bought at cafés before and at the end of a trip, and in train buffet during it. As my career progressed, I could now afford to buy coffee on the go, and social norms meant the flask dissolved as a commonplace object and necessary travel companion for me and others.
Meanwhile, I was taking adventures abroad, and traveling took me across the world and I delighted in the café society I discovered. I lounged in the grand cafés of Krakow, Budapest, Vienna, Paris and Mexico City. I hung out with my son meeting travelers and bohemians in the street cafés of Turkey, Beijing and Kathmandu, or taking in the sun with friends in the outdoor plaza cafés in Italy, Cuba and Spain, or writing postcards home in the dark romantic writers cafés such as Bewley’s Oriental Café in Dublin.
Back home, café society in the UK expanded, breaking out from the binary cafe choice we grew up with. There was the posh tea-house serving leaf tea in china cups, triangular sandwiches, scones jam and cream, and Victoria sponge or Dundee fruit cake. Or the working class ‘greasy spoon’ cafés serving builder’s breakfasts, egg and chips with white bread and mugs of strong sugared tea (still a favourite). New family-owned niche cafés emerged borrowing from our European neighbours, serving expressos and Italian-style cappuccinos. In London and other major cities, continental-owned cafes were already familiar, but these new places were different, they aimed their slick coffee products at a new laptop-carrying, digital generation. I delighted in finding these cool cafés to read papers, socialise and to write in.
Then came the mass expansion of café culture, driven by the gentrified hipster café cultures born in cities like San Francisco, Seattle and Melbourne. The ‘Cappuccino Cult’ spread rapidly across the Western world, escalating from niche coffee houses into global corporate brands such as Starbucks. Starbucks’ business model was to flood an area, killing the small local cafés that had provided diverse aesthetic spaces with delightful home-produced food. Big brands became dominant, pushing local and niche cafes to the margins. They inflicted their conformist décor and cheap-tasting coffee with high-sugar and low-quality food on their new mass market.
As in many other commercial areas, consumers identified more with the brand, than with the quality of the product or service. To join this new elite Cappuccino Cult meant learning the new hip, latte language: ‘skinny latte, two shots with hazel please’. I watched a friend order his coffee and responding to the question ‘what kind of coffee?’ answered ‘normal coffee with milk’ and being looked at with derision by the barista. Whilst avoiding the chains as much as possible, like millions of others I became seduced by the coffee craze. A good strong creamy flat white coffee is a pleasure for sure, yet my consumption went beyond pleasure and became a habit. The Cappuccino Cult had become a mainstream norm, an addictive social ritual for me and millions of others.
The demise of the flask
The old-school coffee flask disappeared in the new world of cool coffee culture. The flask couldn’t produce the frothy coffee or the heart shaped chocolate topping, and it certainly couldn’t help you identify with the new brands that produced a tribe of ‘cool’ coffee aficionados. If Coke was the ‘real thing’ in the 1970s, cappuccino culture had won the day in the new millennium. Branded takeaway coffees with fancy names and prices to match, pre-made supermarket meals and the mass uptake of home delivery food, created a momentum that changed how people ate and drank. The instant gratification of consuming fast foods and take-away drinks, replaced the delayed gratification of slow foods, created with love and care at home.
The thermos flask was an iconic symbol of the slow food way of life. The demise of the flask signified an important social change, and a significant loss.
The flask was eliminated both as an object of desire and as an object of economic necessity for a growing middle class. The flask was relegated to a few mountain walkers and perhaps a few pensioners who kept the faith. A partial flask comeback happened with the designer water bottle (a flask by another name) which also became a part of the new hipster sheik. The side pouch of a computer bag needed a designer water bottle to keep up with the cool fad, which to its credit was more sustainable than buying plastic bottles of water, but to its discredit, it also belongs to consumer culture. Major brands compete to sell their water bottles and their prices match their ‘to-be-seen-with-value’.
The demise of the flask mirrored how the ethic of autonomy and self-sufficiency was lost to the ethic of dependency on consumption. The flask as a transitional object, connecting home and the external world had been replaced by the alienating experience of standing in a queue, returning a smile to the tired barista who performs a thousand smiles a day as part of the emotional labour in their work contract. The corporate beast produces its milky comfort food, the breast milk for adults, and personalises the cup, stroking our fragile and needy egos. I have always thought there is something infantilising about supping warm flavoured milk from the plastic ‘lid-teat’ of a coffee cup.
Covid-19 and the ‘Return of the Repressed’
The flask had become a repressed memory, a forgotten object that occasionally surfaced on a mountainside, or when it popped up in an old photo or movie. That is until Covid-19 struck, lockdown took hold, and coffee outlets and cafés shut. An initial common response from friends was how they would cope without their morning latte fix. Daily routines and addictive habits were broken by Covid-19.
When not traveling for work and grabbing multiple coffees on the go, my pre-Covid routine was to work at the home office, and then take a late morning break to move my body and socialise a little. This meant cycling along the coastal path into Galway City to meet a friend for coffee. I would then continue working in the ‘coffice’, a family owned café that became my office for an hour or so each day. Now what was I to do? Staying at home all day would drive me insane. How to meet my friend and have a coffee when all cafés were shut? Then a ‘return of the repressed’ moment occurred. The flask danced back into my mind and I invited my friend to meet me on Furbo Hill, each of us with a flask of coffee and sandwich.
Furbo Hill is the highest point on the beautiful wild peat boglands 7 km outside of Galway city, and a good short workout on the bike to get there. When on the hill, a 360-degree view greets you. On one side looking across the peat bog is Galway Bay, across the glistening water is the limestone landscape of the Burren in County Clare, reflecting the sunlight and creating a canvas that the cloud shadows dance across. On a clear day, looking out to the Atlantic, the three Aran Islands, Inismor, Inismaan and Inisheer can be seen gently rising out of the water in the far distance. Turning in the other direction, granite grey boulders sit on the brown-green expanse of wet bogland with wind turbines whirling in the distance.
Sat on Furbo Hill, with hot coffee, homemade bread and jelly made from the blackberries, sloes or rosehips we picked last year with the children revitalised my spirits in this extraordinary time. The simple joy of homemade food, accompanied by hot drinks in fresh air with beautiful views, made me so much more content than the previous routine of being sat in a café in town, drinking more coffee than was good for me.
The flask was resurrected and from that first visit to Furbo Hill, and I now take a flask and sandwich whenever I go walking, canoeing, picnicking or cycling. Previously, I would stop at a garage or café for takeaway coffee and a sugary, fatty muffin when on my road bike. Now, I find sheltered spots to rest, read a book or paper, and drink tea or coffee with homemade bread and an apple. My favourite spots are a small derelict schoolhouse built in 1958, sat on top of the bog, or the old church and graveyard overlooking beautiful Spiddal harbour in Connemara.
Flask time is liberation time
I realised that a ‘consumerist addiction’ had crept up on me. A social injunction demanded I reward myself with milky caffeine and a biscuit or cake I didn’t really want, need or enjoy. Being liberated from this ritual is not only a relief but has also recovered an old pleasure that I call flask-time.
Flask-time transcends ‘ordinary time’. In the church, ‘ordinary time’ is the time between special spiritual seasons, for example, Advent, Easter, Christmas. Flask-time is also a special time that, in a different way, also sits outside of ‘ordinary time’. When I take our two children on our cargo bike to their favourite playground and I sit on fishing nets leaning against the lobster pots on the beautiful Claddagh overlooking Galway harbour, I enter flask-time. A time of peace, a time of reflection and a time of deep pleasure.
Flask-time merges past, present and future.
Past: Flask-time reconnects me to the past that lives within me, to my childhood memories of being with my family on holidays. As two brothers and both parents have now passed, this evocation is both subtle and powerful. Flask-time also connects me to the picnics I shared with my son Fynn when I was a home parent, taking our sandwiches to Chester Cathedral gardens or sitting on a canal path together. I lost Fynn over ten years ago and flask-time often evokes his delight when picnicking or his smile when waving as my train sped past.
Present: Flask time in the present day means sharing the delights of eating and resting outdoors with a close friend, or with my wife and children on our family picnics, on a canoe expedition together, or on the secret limestone pavement we found hidden away near Menlo village, with its marvellous water-formed rock shapes and magical plant life. Flask-time when alone brings me a special peace, a space to listen to nature, to the sea washing up on the beach pebbles or the grasses rustle in the wind, and also to listen to what my internal nature is communicating to me.
Future: Flask-time connects me to the future as my children will internalise the same experience I did as a child, recalling our picnics and simple yet transcendent pleasures. They help me make homemade bread and jams and turn these into the sandwiches we share with our hot and cold drinks in outdoor spaces. They will take flask-time into their futures in their own particular ways. Quiet moments on my own, reconnecting to nature and listening to the children play on the swings as I watch cormorants fish for their dinner in the harbour also connects me to the future. It opens a space for drifting, allowing my unconscious to speak, my imagination and creativity to manifest, and in doing so provides new ideas for future writing, work and life plans to emerge.
Flask-time and ‘the good life’
Flask-time reconnects me to living ‘the good life’. A re-enchanting experience that goes beyond the stimulus of noise, busyness and instant gratification. When on a monastic retreat at the Camaldolese Hermitage on the Big Sur, California, a monk told me that I had a strong ‘monk-within’ and that I should make time to nurture it. Flask-time has become a time I nurture my monk-within, taking me into a deep peaceful experience that guides my soul.
Flask-time is an act of resistance, bypassing the consumer experience that always demands excess from us; whether another coffee, cake or buying a designer water bottle. It liberates me so that I now freely choose to have a flat-white and visit one of my favourite cafés because I really want to, not because of an addictive habit or an injunction that demands I follow the social norm. Freed from the compulsion of excess coffee consumption the pleasure of the occasional special coffee is renewed. Freed from being sat indoors or tied to being within walking distance of a coffee shop, I can now drink coffee where-ever my bike and soul take me.
Writing In Praise of the Thermos Flask has been a way of re-visiting what is important in life, of asking myself what really matters. What rituals, patterns and social norms have I drifted into, that disrupt what helps me to live a ‘good life’?
The flask symbolises autonomy and self-sufficiency, breaking free from the dependency consumerist culture that entraps us all. It is one of the small steps towards building a ‘good society’, free from the disabling consumerist habits of constantly chasing surplus enjoyment and instant gratification.
Flask-time produces special moments, it is a time of re-enchantment that allows us to stand outside of ordinary time and commune with our souls, with nature and to experience the sublime.
Flask-time is a symbolic time of emancipation. Perhaps you have your own version of flask-time that has become repressed or lost. Now is the time to re-discover the flask-time in your life, and to praise it once again!
Paid Subscriber Content Below: Further reflections for yourself and your team:
There is a worksheet below that enables you to use this essay as a stimulus for personal development and/or team building.
Work through the reflective questions alone, with a few chosen colleagues, or as a team development exercise.
Reflective Questions
Suggested Format if working with a team
Step 1. Introduction and Check-in: 10 min
Choose a facilitator to keep the time and to ensure everybody’s voice is heard. It is good to rotate this role at each new session.
We suggest that you set aside one hour of team development to work through this exercise. Find a quiet space without any interruptions to work in.
Begin by taking a few minutes to check in with each other: how are each of you arriving at this team event?
Step 2. Read the essay: 5 min
Take 5 minutes to read this essay again (somebody reading it out loud is a powerful and enjoyable experience).
Step 3. Work through these three questions: 30 min
After the facilitator reads the question, encourage each person to share their response with the group and then discuss- or if working alone journal your answers and reflect on them later.
1. Share your emotional response to this essay. What did it stir in you?
Discuss for 10 minutes
2. Have you as an individual or as a team, got trapped in unwanted patterns, that take you away from living a good life together i.e. working creatively as a team?
Discuss 10 minutes
3. What could you do to simplify something, to regain a sense of re-enchantment in your work-life together?
Discuss 10 minutes
Step 4. Roundup: 15 min
Reflect on your discussion, what are the key takeaways?
Are any actions to be taken?
Plan your next session!
I hope that this essay and these reflections will be beneficial to you and your team as you work towards creating the ‘good society’.