13: In Praise of the Flask: The Art of Living the Good Life with Simon Western

In this podcast I read a short essay that explores the art of
living the good life through the lens of the thermos flask.

Internalised as a childhood ‘good object’ that represented happy
times- family holidays and mountain walks- and it produced ‘good
things’ that comforted me; warm nourishing soup and hot coffee.
It acted as a transitional object when I travelled, 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.

Covid19 lockdown closed the cafes I frequented and a ‘return of
the repressed’ occurred. The 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 by-passes consumerism, connects me to
the past, present and future, and emancipates me from patterns I
was previously entrapped in. I praise the 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 to what it means to live the
good-life. 

A print version of this essay can be found here: In Praise of the
Flask