When Boom Booms, Pink Energy, and Rainy-Day Philosophy Collide
There are meetings, and then there are Lunch with Janita & Frank meetings—the sort that begin with rain clouds, sleepy greetings, and the immediate possibility that absolutely nothing will go according to plan. This one had all the right ingredients: Rosie arriving with soft rainy-day energy from Brazil, Frank in full mischievous mayor mode from France, and Janita—Fruitloop herself—trying, valiantly, to host a conversation about communication and energy while the conversation itself kept joyfully escaping into the bushes. It was almost, the one-year anniversary gathering in disguise, dressed up as a discussion about tone of voice and body language, but really it was a celebration of what happens when people like each other enough to let the conversation wobble. That, in its own wonderfully chaotic way, is exactly the spirit of Lunch: warm, reflective, playful, and gloriously human.
The weather set the tone before anyone really did. Rosie and Janita had rain. Frank had sun. Rosie confessed that rainy weather makes sleep feel irresistibly good, which naturally led Frank to accuse the women of laziness, only to be immediately outnumbered. It was that kind of meeting: light teasing, no sharp edges, everyone slightly dramatic, nobody offended. You could almost hear the mugs clinking through the screen. Communication, they said, can drain energy or give it. And within minutes they were proving the point by giving each other exactly that—energy, through laughter, timing, and the kind of affectionate interruption that only works when trust is already sitting comfortably at the table.
Then came the practical matter of attendance, which was handled with all the smooth efficiency of a bicycle going down stairs. Who was travelling, who had left the group, who might return, who perhaps needed a separate meeting—all of this was discussed with the cheerful disorder of three people trying to tidy a room by throwing glitter at it. Somewhere in there, they remembered that this gathering is nearly a year old. One whole year of Thursdays, tangents, jokes, questions, and accidental wisdom. A cake was immediately proposed. Sparkling water with lime and ice was added to the imaginary menu, because if you are going to celebrate an anniversary across continents, you may as well do it with elegance and bubbles.
Janita, in her role as patient ringmaster, tried to return everyone to the official subject: how do tone of voice and body language change the mood of a conversation? Rosie, in searching for the answer, gave something even better than a textbook response. She gave a real one. A tired teacher can make students feel flat before the lesson has even begun. An angry expression can darken a room before a single sentence lands. A smile can lift it. A voice can invite or exclude. A face can say I’m glad you’re here or I’d rather be anywhere else. Which is, of course, why this meeting worked so well: whatever else was chaotic, nobody here ever sounded as though they wished to be somewhere else.
And then, because no Lunch meeting can stay on one road for too long, language itself became the entertainment. Rosie tried to explain a Portuguese expression involving someone waking up angry because their bums were sticking out (something like that)—an image that travelled, by scenic route, through “boom booms,” bums, butts, and Frank’s delighted decision to adopt the word forever. It was the sort of moment that would make no sense in a boardroom and complete sense here. Nobody rushed her. Nobody corrected her with cold precision. They waited, guessed, laughed, and built the meaning together. That multicultural gentleness—the shared effort of finding the right word and enjoying the wrong ones on the way—is one of the meeting’s quiet superpowers.
Frank, naturally, turned the conversation philosophical just as it was threatening to become entirely about boom booms. He spoke about the first time Janita joined one of these meetings and how one spontaneous comment of hers changed everything. In telling a story about cultural expectations and visiting someone’s home, he recalled Janita’s instant response to his imagined overdressed arrival: she would simply fetch him something else to wear. That was the moment, he said, the moment he knew this had to continue. It was a lovely admission, tucked inside the silliness like a note folded into a napkin. Tone of voice mattered there too. Not just what she said, but how she said it—easy, funny, warm, immediate. Sometimes a meeting changes direction because of strategy. Sometimes it changes because one person says one human thing in exactly the right way.
Rosie brought it back to daily life with a story from her boss’s birthday celebration at a bar, where conversation, laughter, food, and body language all mixed into the kind of energy you can feel long after the chairs are stacked. She kept returning to how much can be said without words: one expression, one gesture, one face across the table. You got the sense that for Rosie, communication is not only something spoken but something felt in the air between people. And perhaps that is why she fits so naturally into these meetings. Her English may pause, search, and wander now and then, but her meaning almost always arrives smiling.
Frank, meanwhile, offered one of those stories that manages to be funny and slightly tragic at the same time: a training session in Germany where the client announced, in front of everyone, that the class was boring. Not might become boring. Not needed more energy. Just boring, directly, dramatically, decisively. If anyone needed a demonstration of how tone can flatten a room, there it was. Yet even this embarrassment became part of the shared comedy. In the Lunch world, humiliation is rarely left alone to sulk. It gets invited into the conversation, handed a biscuit, and transformed into a story worth retelling.
One of the loveliest turns came when they spoke about speaking in a second language. Rosie admitted she feels most comfortable in Portuguese, of course, but also surprisingly safe in this group. That mattered. She does not always know the word. She does not always find the expression. But she feels comfortable enough to try, and trying is everything. Nobody at this table speaks perfect English, not really—not in the polished, sterile sense. But perfection would spoil the mood anyway. Here, language is less about performance and more about cooperation. Someone starts a sentence, someone else helps lift it across the finish line. That too is communication giving energy rather than taking it away.
Later, the conversation drifted—as good conversations should—into colour. If positive energy had a colour, what would it be? Rosie chose orange and green, bright, happy, alive colours that she already wears as if dressing in optimism were a daily discipline. Frank chose yellow, the colour of sunlight after winter, which felt perfectly on brand for a man who can turn mild weather commentary into a small civic speech. Janita chose pink, of course—soft, cheerful, sparkling pink, the sort of colour that already seems to arrive five minutes before she does. Suddenly the meeting had become a kind of emotional paint chart: Rosie in orange-green joy, Frank in yellow sunbeams, Janita in pink brightness. Communication, in the end, was not only sound or gesture. It was atmosphere. It was colour. It was the glow people leave in each other when a conversation goes right.
By the end, they had covered body language, Churchill, Barack Obama, YouTube comedy, sprinkles on imaginary ice cream, hidden home dresses, possible future travel plans, marital mugs, and at least one reference too many to underwear. Fatima, the absent guest, was perhaps spared. Or perhaps she missed the finest possible introduction. Because this meeting was not polished, and it was never trying to be. It was alive. It was messy in the way friendships are messy—full of interruptions, private references, repeated jokes, and the deep comfort of being able to say something odd and know the room will make space for it.
And somewhere between the rain, the anniversary cake planning, the body-language philosophy, and the now-immortal boom boom discussion, a real point quietly emerged. Positive communication does not require grand speeches. Sometimes it is a smile. Sometimes it is waiting while someone searches for a word. Sometimes it is laughing at the wrong thing and still landing on the right meaning. And sometimes it is simply this: three people, in three different places, showing up again for one another and leaving the table a little brighter than they found it.
Which may be the real colour of energy after all.
