the tourist cafe in cooma is quite an institution. above the main counter, above the decades-old kitschy souvenirs that no-one ever buys, there is a lurid painted frieze depicting a range of traditional greek delicaies. but that olde time menu is now somewhat surpassed by a range of hearty australian dishes, all of which come with chips. even breakfast! this is where i had a mushroom omelette a couple years ago — a large, rubbery omelette riddled with small, rubbery mushrooms.

so this time, i thought i’d play it safe and order the toasted cheese and tomato open sandwich. look how it glstens! and look at those chips, fried up just how i like — overcooked and dessicated, with a whiff of stale oil. i like chips cooked in many, many ways.

the kid had an order of cinnamon toast: cheap and nasty white bread, well-buttered and generously dusted with cinnamon sugar — the cook had used the edge of the plate as his boundary, rather than the edge of the toast. (and what a plate! much better than the trendy square of white china on which my cheese-on-toast arrived.)

but the very best thing about tourist cafe is the iced chocolate. a comically large glass of milk and ice cream doused in chocolate syrup, and topped with a cloud of whipped cream as big as your head. if you have a small head.

i ate a lot of meat that week away: meat pie followed by meat pie followed by pastie. a home-cooked roast beef in rutherglen with all the fixin’s, and then another one at the ex-services club in cooma, with an endless bar of serve-yourself condiments. one of those meltaway supermarket tandoori chickens in a bag. a good portion of a salami marked down for quick sale. it was a pattern broken only when we returned to the civilisation that is the harmonie german club along one of canberra’s indistinguishable arteries: some slabs of fat, roasted pork, practically quivering in the shadow of a great mountain of red cabbage.

after i arrived back in sydney, i spent the first two days eating bowls of noodle soups for almost every meal.