Coffeehouse 6: The Unnecessary Reboot of an Old Classic!

First one since July 2013!

There’s a new barista in the coffeehouse.  He has an oddly slack face, but a very smiley mouth.  Like he’s not quite awake yet; he looks sleepy and slow moving, messy hair, minimal eye contact.  Sleep still in the corners of his eyes.  The large Manageress, as beautiful and voluminous as ever in her huge black apron moves faster than you’d think she could, almost whirling about her area, laughing quietly, and chatting to him non-stop about a competition she’s entered.  I sit in the far corner, listening to the soft sounds of their conversation mingling with the other soft conversations and the harp concerto on the overhead speakers: something that moves repetitively up and down, in a riff.  Hypnotic.   It’s 7.05 a.m.  I am here early, but already the baristas are in the swing of the day, and the coffeehouse is half full.

There’s a tidy man next to me diagonally.  He wears small rimmed glasses, has quietly combed hair and is earnestly doing a crossword next to his empty demitasse cup.  He smiles at me fleetingly when he catches me staring (occupational hazard, the staring and the getting caught at it).  He has very intelligent assessing eyes.  I feel momentarily uncomfortable and look away.

Tory businessman (of this post of old) has put on a bit of weight, and sits near the front of the coffeehouse, looking out, looking around, always checking his environment.  He’s on his phone, as ever, and suddenly he is much louder than everyone else, and we can all hear his business deal being conducted.  Even his pale blue shirt looks oddly loud on him today.  Might be that he’s by the window, and the light has suddenly risen clearer, clouds out of the way of the sun.  Spring is soon here, the light comes much sooner now.

I’m aware that I’m really not properly conscious yet.  I feel a bit dizzy in my head, and when I watch my hands, they shake ever so slightly.  This isn’t a hangover or anything; I barely drink except on special occasions.  This is just years of hardly sleeping, so that I always seem to be in a very deep sleep just prior to actual waking up time.  It’s like trying to pull myself back to the world through fifty duvets.  My head suffocates on feathers and wants to let go into them.  I have to hold tight to what level of consciousness I can get.  Sometimes I don’t feel like I’m properly in the world till about 8 in the evening, when I will suddenly wake up truly and feel in synch with my surroundings, no longer ‘behind myself’ as my mother would say.  I get up and tell my legs to move to the counter to get another coffee.  This is quite rare, feeling so out of it that I actually need 2 coffees.  I squint in the light as I get closer to the front of the shop, from where I have been hiding at the back.  I ask for amaretto syrup in my soymilk latte, just for a change, hoping it will shock my mouth and slap the rest of me behind the eyes.

I also order porridge, and take it carefully back to my seat, hearing Tory businessman get ever so slightly quieter as I move away from him.  We are back to nodding now, after our long ago disagreement.  I take the lid off the honey and watch it catch the light as it gloops out, golden and perfect, into the sludge that is the porridge.  I stir and lick the pot and generally try to extract all possible honey from the situation.  When I am finished and have enthusiastically stirred, I look up and find Tidy Man looking at me again.  I smile and realise there’s honey on my chin too, I wipe at it and lick my fingers, embarrassed.  The overhead music has switched to The Magic Flute, and Pagagaina is making me feel even sillier.

Tidy Man does a me and suddenly gets up and sits next to me, quite too close indeed, and says he couldn’t help noticing that I keep rubbing my neck and the top of my back.  I am quite perplexed at someone so abruptly getting right in my space, but there we are; I do this to people, so I suppose it will happen to me sometimes too.  I hope I don’t stare at people in quite this way though – he is looking at me slightly too intensely, slightly too intently.  I feel a bit creeped out.  I move back in my chair ever so slightly and fold my hands infront of me, and reply that yes, I have a stiff neck and a bad back.  Turns out he’s a Sports Therapist (so you say, you possible serial killer! - God, hope people don’t think I’m a serial killer too??).  He tries to lure me away from my chiropractor, talking about reduced fees and comparisons of length of treatment. 

I feel this is a big flaw with the modern world, you know.  This idea of sudden networking; that you can get in anyone’s face at any time, and casually start trying to sell yourself or your business to them.  Especially if they are your friends.  It’s maddening.  It makes me feel as if the person talking to me has absolutely no care or interest in me at all, as me; I am just a possible score, a possible fee.  They are rudely trying to mirror my gestures and tailor their language to fit mine (which is amusing when I am in the mood for Laurence Sterne type eighteenth century sentences with many unnecessary clauses and extra adjectives).  It’s a total con, and hardly anyone is any good at it.  I listen to his patter, feel still creeped out, and also sorry for him, because I’m scoring him out of ten for his sales pitch and so far he has two.  Blame that on the insincerity I can hear.  I am aware I’m making a face, my unimpressed face.  I usually only make outright rude faces at people I know, as I figure they probably deserve it if I am, and also, they can take it, as they know me.  But I also make faces at annoying sales people and sometimes ...you know, Tories.  (And most recently, yesterday, at Jack Straw’s photo while I was reading The Times: I mean, you expect that kind of cash for questions/introductions crap from the Conservatives, but Labour…in the run up to the election?  You stupid absent of all campaign that I can see, idiot wankers.  You want to Give The Election Away?  TSK.  Anyway.)

For no reason that I can see, I’m struck by a vivid visual memory:  When we first moved to this house we had a problem with mice. We tried several humane deterrents which didn't work. Traditional snappy traps worked. They have not been back since. I felt awful taking the little corpses away.  It only happened 4 or 5 times before they got the message.  Once, a trap failed a bit, and we found a mouse with his little back leg caught in it.  I wanted to kill him, a mercy killing, as I didn't see how he could have survived with one less leg and I didn't want him to be limping prey for some big cat or something, or a fox.  But Stanley set him free, and he ran off as best he could.  He was the last mouse we ever saw in the garden, though we kept the traps up for another winter.  I think they went and told their friends that we were barbarous, cruel and dangerous, so they stayed away. I was saddened and ashamed, but they couldn't keep coming in the house - they were in all the rooms, they have diseases: Fluffhead was small and fragile.  I cried for days at the wounded mouse.

So there's my awful little mouse tale.  The weird thing is, they were so lovely, so beautiful, little dark things. Smooth and soft and compact.   And yet once, the next spring, I found a corpse (must have been left by cat or fox) of a huge rat in the garden.  I couldn't understand my reaction to it at all.  I couldn't go anywhere near it.  I looked from further than arm's length and I was utterly revolted.  Its largeness, bulkiness, it’s rough and matted hair.  It’s cruel looking little teeth, its ugly segmented tail. I was giving it these sobriquets while I was looking at it: ugly, cruel etc.  It seemed to just pop out of some base bit of my brain.  I was completely unaware that I have anything against rats at all - you hear about how very intelligent and clever they are.  Yet when I saw it, I could not even touch it to take its body away.  I had a shovel and couldn't even shovel it without touching it directly.  It was a really weird experience.  I had to wait for Stanley to come home and do it.  I couldn't understand myself at all.

Weird. Why am I looking at Tidy Man, who seems undeterred by my unimpressed face and my now folded arms, and remembering this?  I do my puzzled face.  He stops talking.  He writes his name and phone number on a napkin, and says he’ll leave it to me, to decide if I want ‘treatment’ with him (I see a serial killer with an oddly ratty pointy face, I’m tied up on a ‘treatment’ table in a soundproofed room; I’m still being mean to rats, what is up with that?).  Tidy Man seems already to have tidied away his things and he is now leaving.  He waves at me, a small and very brief gesture and is gone without looking back.  I am still sitting there with folded arms and I haven’t said a word since I confirmed I had a bad back.  How did I make him leave?  Did he read the unsucess of his pitch on my face?  Did he see me phase out when I thought of mice and rats?  I unfold my arms and realise I have hiked my shoulders right up tensely.  I let them deliberately down and shake my head.

Where Tidy Man was are now two women, both licking the foam from the top of cappuccinos. They have their heads together, locked in instant terribly important conversation.  Both wear purple sweaters and black scarves looped loosely over their shoulders.  Some kind of uniform?  A third woman turns up and it’s as if she calls them to order – they stop talking instantly and pay attention to her.  Same clothes.  Line Manager?

Near the window, Tory businessman has vacated, and a woman with wavy soft brown hair and a permanent slight smile on her face, pink cheeks from the wind, has sat.  I can see her face as she checks messages on her phone.  The slight smile holds.  She gets up and goes to order coffee, scratches her elbow absently.  The smile holds.  I always wonder about those people with the slight soft smiles.  The Mona Lisa smile that doesn’t vary.  It’s not as if they are remembering something, or thinking happy thoughts, because the quality of the smile is unchanging, as if this is how their face settles, in repose. I read in a magazine once that you should try and hold your face like that (if you are a grumpy person like me), as it releases endorphins, and it takes less facial muscles to smile than to frown or hold a blank depressed face (odd).  It fools your brain into thinking you are more peaceful and receptive than you are feeling.  I am not entirely convinced, and watching the woman, it does look a bit vacuous, as if her face has just gone to sleep.  Like a Barbie but only half finished.  But I am probably jealous, so I won’t criticise.  I hope she is thinking happy thoughts.  Maybe she has that song in her head. Good song.  Weirdly deluded, but good song.  She’s dressed in shades of grey with small flowers over everything.  She shakes some chocolate powder over her hot chocolate with cream.  Mmmmm.  She has hot chocolate.  She MUST be happy.

A man sits down at the table directly opposite me.  He is one of those people who take up space.  And make noise without being aware of it.  He sniffs very loudly.  Sings tunelessly to himself while setting up his laptop, and messily drapes his very puffy anorak over the back of the chair he has pushed out, effectively hemming me in to my table.  He smiles hugely at me (which I see out of the corner of my ‘leave me alone’ eye; see, this is the punishment I get for being friendly so often, today I am attracting annoying people).  I smile back nonetheless, as I don’t want to hurt his feelings.  I do one of those without teeth smiles, of medium warmth.  He makes a lot more noise chatting to the barista who comes to take the tray of the last patron away.  When the barista goes, he mutters to himself.  “Talk to yourself inside your head”, I want to say, exasperated.  But I don’t.  I can just tell I’m going to have trouble reading now, as my left ear is listening to his murmuring and sniffling and bashing away at the laptop keys; his constant readjustment of himself in his chair.  Argh.

Further away, my attention is taken up immediately by a baby crying.  A work from home father I have seen before, has gone to the toilet and his baby is wriggling in its wooden high chair and crying heartbrokenly at the sudden removal of company.  I wonder how long it will be before I don’t feel the cries of ANY baby as a physical compulsion to go and pick them up and cuddle, soothe them?  I remember with Fry it didn’t seem to stop till he was in secondary school.  God, that’s ages yet for Fluffhead.  Thankfully, the father reemerges and the baby immediately stops wailing.  The father dries its eyes with a tissue and plays a wiping nose game, making honking noises for the baby.  The noise I hear now is the baby laughter, that very sweet sound of the laughter that seems to roil up like lava inside the child and erupt out so violently it often causes hiccups.  The game goes on for quite some time, and I watch, quite transfixed at the smiling and the way the whole body moves with each hiccupping explosion.  Its small hands wave about, conducting the joke.

When they simmer down, and the father begins to check his emails, the baby is holding his bottle, and looking about alertly at everyone.  The man opposite seems also to have subsided, and the harp concerto is back on.  It’s 9 a.m.  and it’s quiet again.  I close my notebook and open my kindle.