Cutting Corners. by IRA MAINE.

I was watching, in a purely academic way, as Herself withdrew from the oven one of her delectable loaves of bread.  This happens in our kitchen a couple of times a week and I always contrive to be nonchalantly thereabouts, subtly aware that within half an hour there’ll be a buttery, hot and crusty morsel available if I just happen to be passing.  These, as you might expect, are no ordinary loaves.  They are raised in an overnight bowl, then the spongy, springy dough is placed in a hot cast iron pot, in a hot oven, to bake.  The results are magical and probably close to the bread they eat in Heaven.  One way or the other the bread is baked in a round pot so the resulting loaf is wheel shaped, high in the middle and flattening towards the edges.  As a result of this, to take a satisfying slice off one edge you have to first remove a bit of the curved edge and place it carefully on one side.
That bit, that crusty little offcut is the reason why I am busy with very important structural alterations just outside the kitchen when this hot and steaming surgical procedure takes place.  All that crackly crust, the overwhelming smell of hot baked bread, the steamed and runny butter dripping on your chin… ‘Heaven, I’m in Heaven…’

Now you may have just woken up and thought, for a fleeting moment, you’d accidentally stumbled into a bread-making class.  This is not the case.  I have simply used the bread-making process as a tool to point out to you one of the principle reasons why the world has changed and why we need to abandon corners.

With a round loaf, there’s always that little offcut.  In the olden days, before they invented bread tins, all bread was round.  Multiply all those tiny offcuts by millions and you have enough little bits of bread to feed a million chickens.  That’s the only reason we’ve still got chickens!  It was a cruel person, a thoughtless, uncaring technocrat who dreamed up the nightmare bread tin and deprived the chooks of their daily sustenance.  As a result of this shameful deprivation, it immediately became necessary to invent chook pellets.

And it doesn’t end there.  The bread tin mercilessly seized the round and sensual loaf and forced it to conform to the tin.  Go to the shops and see the results.  Bedraggled and soggy, the box-like and misshapen bread looks betrayed and tortured, as if the loaf has been denied it’s birthright.  It’s a spongy, wrapped and soggy shadow of it’s former self.  And it’s not just the loaf…

Houses have nothing but corners.  Which particular oaf or oafess invented those?  Probably the same guy who invented bread tins.  I distinctly remember being a kid and standing, facing the corner, whilst the other kids smirked.  If there were no corners you wouldn’t feel cornered…so to speak.  I’ve also crashed into the corner of our house on my bike, (and once in the car).  Go on, try putting stuff away in that corner cupboard in the kitchen where the worktop performs a right angle.  I’ve been on my belly, on the floor, poking around with a walking stick to retrieve stuff out of that creation.  I reckon there are items in there which are permanently lost to civilisation, whatever they are.  Another thing; there’s no piece of furniture on earth, of any practical value, that will fit in a corner, except,perhaps a pot plant.  The pot-plant is always on a stand, which, like the treacherous limb of an old red-gum, invariably topples over and knocks the dog unconscious.  Old Pythagoras and Euclid have a lot to answer for, because it’s bloody obvious that when they went about their geometrical duties, the corner cupboard didn’t even cross their minds, let alone the cost of having the dog’s head repaired.
No, if we bring back the round house, which is how people lived for many thousands of years, we can then turn full circle, and people will begin to remember that things are not only made round to go round, but that the circle has been round for a long time.

Publishers Note: We published Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poem Circles and Squares a few weeks ago.  Revisit it here.