If you do like this post and newsletter, please subscribe and share links on social media. It’s barely growing and like all my work, deserves better, I think.
I’m back in the back-up café today. It’s like being in a relationship, in my case with the SW8 Portuguese café for the last 21.5 years, but you find yourself being drawn to another woman who’s slowly growing on you, in this case, the back-up café. Watching Downton Abbey (series 3 now), I’m reminded that in S2, Robert Crawley had a fling with one of the maids. There’s always a little curiosity when someone’s a little disenchanted with things.
Last night was a relatively early one. There was disappointment yesterday when my friend was unable to fix my desktop PC. As I suspected, the problem is far more serious and even this IT guy’s IT Guy, who he was communicating with throughout as he slowly realised that I was onto something when I told him I suspected the desktop’s issue was far more serious than he thought, even that guy was struggling. The suspicion is it’s now either a ram issue or the motherboard. The latter would be unusual, apparently. I have no idea what they’re talking about. I just know it’s caused me untold problems in recent months. I’m old school. I like to print documents (never mind I can’t access them) and it’s making it hard for me to learn new sets. I’ve finally managed to get the printer working on this run-around laptop, so that’s something.
At one point, my friend decided to hook up the TV to the PC unit, suspecting it was a monitor issue - it wasn’t. He was asking me if the TV was a HDMI-something. I don’t know. I’m not a tech guy. I just sought guarantees he’d hook the TV back up. I don’t touch those things. Tech holds little interest for me so I try not to tamper with it.
By the way, my friend’s entry into the flat was predictably ragged, though to be fair it was better than last time and his shoe removal inside the communal (antechamber) hallway had, I’m please to report, improved. When moving into the front room, I directed him to place his rucksack on the specially designated bag-placement area, several recycling bags laid out by my desk. He then did that thing visitors tend to do when you make some special request, and they look around and find faults in the flat that suggest inconsistency on your part. People miss the point. The idea is to keep the street out of the home. Shoe removal. Bag placement. These are all important.
Of course, you’ll know I only wear indoor-only clothes in the flat. I can’t request my visitors do the same. I’d have no proof their clothes have been worn outdoors, unless I pay for DNA analysis. This friend, one of my oldest, is also a cat man and often turns up covered in cat hair. Still, once he left, I carried out a thorough clean of the areas he’d been active in.
I caught the latter stages of the Netherlands v Argentina. This particular game always has particularly uncomfortable connotations for me because as a small boy, watching the start of the ’78 Ticker Tape Final at my neighbours in my green pyjamas (short sleeves and shorts), my neighbour’s daughter had pulled my shorts down in front of everyone. I wasn’t wearing pants (underwear for American readers). I’ll park that memory there.
I don’t buy into the drama of penalty shootouts. We’ve seen so many in the last 30+ years, it’s like watching a show on repeat and I think for what is supposedly the world’s greatest competition, FIFA needs to find a better solution. The best teams should win the World Cup. Penalties, cliché-Klaxon, are a lottery.
I’ve always been fascinated by the ’74 and ’78 tournaments, arguably the two strongest World Cups there’ve ever been, in which FIFA did away with the knockout stages. Teams played opening groups then progressed to a second stage and within those second group stages, there were memorable games, particularly in ’74, which served as de facto semi-finals, Poland against the hosts West Germany and more famously, Cruyff’s brilliant Dutch side who dismantled the defending champions, a brutal Brazil side who realising the European nations had usurped them, had resorted to thuggery, not appreciating the Dutch could look after themselves.
’82 probably had the best balance of all for those who like the cup element of the World Cup, reintroducing semi-finals for the first time since ’70 and I’m prepared to compromise and say I have no problem with semi-finals. Knockout stages as early as the last 16 when you’re trying to establish the world’s best team, that just doesn’t work for me. What I love about those ’74 and ’78 tournaments is there was an element of the Last Man Standing about them, with most of the best teams playing each other under this league system.
Above: Another new build I’m unlikely to have a chance to live in.
It'll be interesting today to see what happens when I pay in the back-up café. The woman here has taken to rounding up my payment on my card to include a tip, rendering the 12p tip I was going to sneak into their tip box the other day, redundant. I’m wondering if this is something they do with customers they’ve identified as frugal? Did she see something in me where she thought, “Yeah, we can do that to this guy?”
When they open the tip box on a Tuesday and see the shrapnel in there, are they convinced they can link this to me? Are they certain this never happened before I rolled up in here for the first time back in the summer?
Do any other customers tip with shrapnel? I mean, we have a cost-of-living crisis, right? I can’t be the only one falling back on small change. Are the staff here keeping track of the shrapnel appearing every Tuesday in their tip box and easily associating this with my visits?
I’m thinking some spreadsheet might be doing the rounds here. If indeed the woman does take my payment today and again forces the tip on me, I may still use the tip box, making sure she sees me doing this. This time, I’ll leave out the shrapnel. When they open the tip box, if there’s no shrapnel, maybe it’ll place some doubt in their minds and they review their strategy of taking the tip from my card.
Perhaps a high-level meeting takes place over the weekend where they decide to abandon this strategy of forcing the tip on me because it’s now doubtful I’m the guy behind the shrapnel.
Either way, getting this automatic tip off my card looks problematic. Now I’m thinking I possibly need to make a grand gesture. Hear me out: I hand my card to pay for the lattes. I hold out a single 50p coin, pre-shined, glimmering, catching her eye, and I tell her, “Actually, let me just get rid of this and just keep the card payment to £4.80.” Then next time, hopefully, she thinks twice before adding the tip to my card. Meantime, when tipping into the box, I again revive the shrapnel-heavy tip. You always need to think strategies.
In non-café news, my aunt's given me some out-of-date ham.
Did she know?
That's what I'm wondering.
If she did, maybe her thinking was, "He's a writer. He's not going to be worrying about expiry dates."
On my way home, I’ll be popping into a couple of shops to see if I can find any crackers. The current Jacob’s strike is wreaking havoc on the cracker scene, explaining why the budget crackers beloved by writers but shunned by the majority of Jacob loyalists, are scarce on supermarket shelves. I suspect if I see overpriced crackers in store, I’m going to have to bite the bullet as I’m running perilously low on crackers. Lightly buttered crackers dunked in coffee have been the breakfast of my life since I was 7 or 8-years-old. I’m that kind of guy. I find the thing I love and stick with it. Admittedly, that never quite applied to relationships.
Lined up this afternoon, I’ve got a lazy, b***-shrinking winter run, some reading and two Christmas Cup Quarter-Final second legs ties to get through. Bespin will look to manage their narrow 1-0 lead as they travel to Star Wars Football new boys (and girls -it’s been mixed sex football since 1983) Geonosis, while Apex Overlook, no doubt disappointed at Hoth pulling back two late goals to draw level at 2-2, will be hoping to at least make those two away goals count. Hoth, remember, won the first ever Christmas Cup back in 1983, though the first Christmas Eve Final wasn’t until 1984 (X-Wing beating Bespin on penalties, widely regarded as the greatest ever single game in Star Wars Football history), and they’ve reached every Christmas Cup last four since the competition returned in 2019.
Footnote: My first latte, with 10mm of coffee still left, was spirited away with the woman looking, I suspect, to cut down on my latte-nursing times. She also acknowledged she’d forgotten my second latte, which took 18 minutes to arrive.
She’s turning out to be a formidable opponent.
Footnote x 2: I paid £1 for Jacob’s Crackers in Iceland. The packet is much smaller than I remember.
Twitter: @1607WestEgg
FB: @DRTcomedy
Instagram: @1607westegg
TikTok: @1607WestEgg