I’m in THE café for the first time this week, a Friday afternoon treat after a demanding couple of days. That’s what this place is now, just a treat. After a 22-year unbroken run, pandemic aside, that golden age is now over.
It now feels like I’ve been gone for so long from my happy place, even my phone was no longer connecting to the wi-fi. I hate that moment where you have to ask for the wi-fi password. It makes me feel like a Millennial.
In other news, THERE IS STILL NO HANDWASH IN THE GENTS.
What is going on here?
Does no one check?
If they have handwash in the ladies, which is adjacent, how is it they don’t check the gents?
Do they just not expect the guys to wash their hands?
Are they happy with that?
I squeezed in a pre-gig 6.5k run last night which made me feel brighter, though the dodgy knee was giving me plenty of trouble in bed later so I necked a couple of painkillers in dramatic fashion, like they do in TV and film, though living alone, I have no idea who I was trying to impress. The shorts were finally back for the run, which felt liberating, but the park remained boggy. The plan is another run this evening to make up for not having the Wednesday run. Hopefully, the rain dies off.
This morning I had to take my aunt to the GP again. I didn’t have much of an understanding as to why we were going this time. The GP was confused. I was confused. And my aunt, well, f*** me, she’s always confused. And once her confusion became clear, the GP and I both became even more confused.
At one point during the appointment, she wondered aloud where the interpreter was. I explained that was only if I couldn’t make it. Why would she need an interpreter if I was there, and I can speak English and Spanish? This is nothing to do with her age now. Her shifting age, I should add. No one is certain of her actual age. My aunt would’ve asked this question at any point in her life.
She also drained my latest bottle of fragrance-free hand gel. It’s as if Covid never happened. We left her flat, got in the lift. She pressed the button for the ground floor then immediately touched her mouth and then her nose. Horrified, I admonished her for this as we left her block.
On returning to the flat, her and my uncle had their usual rows. It’s never just one argument. And often the disputes overlap. They’re hard to follow, these arguments, but I do my best to mediate. My uncle, it’s hard to watch what’s happening with him. I spoke to him again about maybe getting out of the flat to distract himself. He told me he’s accepted his lot. He knows his time is limited. His concern is what happens to my aunt once he’s gone. I believe him. He’s old school. Stoical. I don’t think death, at this point, holds much fear for him. His quality of life over the last few years has been eroded bit by bit to the extent he is housebound now. He’s resigned and accepting of his fate. His concern is my aunt.
“Of course, she won’t be on her own,” I told him.
“I would hope not.”
“We owe you guys, and you have to believe we’ll do our best.”
There was then a brief silence before my aunt returned to the kitchen and her and my uncle resumed the rowing. I was able to briefly douse this by showing my uncle a picture of the place I viewed a few days ago, the one with the bathroom only accessible via the bedroom. He hadn’t believed it could be possible. He does now.
Back here in THE café’, Phil Collins, the little waitress, does that nice thing where you push two table together to give me more space for my work. I had hoped to crack on right away when I got here but had to wait 10 or so minutes for a table, the rain probably keeping the lunchtime clientele in the café for longer today. The Mullet, I should say, has a particularly slick looking barnet today, completed by a brilliant beard. It’s always been a regret that I could never grow a big beard. The plus side is that it means I’ve never been one of those guys prone to five ‘o clock shadow (or is it four o’ clock?) every few hours.
The Beard tells me we have really good weather on the way for next week. I hope so. We need this rain to disappear. And that’s enough of the weather-related SMALL talk.
The Beard and I moved onto discussing all things ‘Spurs’. They’re his English team. Antonio Conte has moved on, of course, and The Beard would like either of the recently sacked Julian Nagelsmann or former boss Mauricio Pochettino to succeed Conte. I think football might be the only profession where you’re still in demand if you’ve been fired. As someone very familiar with the P45 and even the physical process of being escorted from a building by security (it really tests your SMALL talk), maybe I should’ve been involved in football.
Meantime, Julio Iglesias is playing in THE café, his old duet with Sting, ‘Fragile’. Iglesias is such a cheesy guy, but I’ve always given him his dues on the voice. He has a beautiful voice. He once claimed he’d had sex every day since 1979 which I just couldn’t believe. This was in the late nineties. There must’ve been a day when he wasn’t up for it. If you weren’t in the mood, would you really push yourself just so you could maintain this record that wouldn’t be important to anyone else?
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Disappointingly, Wednesday’s paid closing spot in Kent has just fallen through. Apart from losing the money, as importantly I think, the experience of doing another 20–25-minute spot, has fallen by the wayside. The promoter though was kind enough to call. They didn’t really need to and I’m confident this guy is a man of their word and there’ll be another opportunity. I wish there were more promoters like him.
The disappointment is just short term. It does make next week slightly easier in terms of freeing up hours and hours of rehearsal time. Yesterday I was rehearsing like an absolute dog for about six hours just to learn a new two-minute bit to incorporate into last night’s Camberwell spot where I was opening. This stand-up thing takes over your life if you want to do it properly.
I could’ve gone down the easy route last night and gone on stage with a notebook or notes on my hand, but I’ve never done it and never will. I have to trust that all the hours I rehearse count for something on the night. I also, quite frankly, feel that notes and hand scrawls make it s*** for the audience. I treat every show like a proper event, even if some of them are just absolutely dead owing to promotion being non-existent. Also, eyesight is becoming an issue for me. If I was to fallback on notebooks, for instance, I’d need my glasses on stage with me.
So, it’s been a slightly disappointing day. Losing a good spot, spending time with my uncle and having yet another difficult conversation because ultimately, there is nothing we can do or say to change the stark reality of what’s happening. Apart from loving him and never having an uncle I was closer to, I have enormous respect for the man he has been and remains. That wasn’t the example I saw in my own home. To see what a good man should be, I had to learn that from watching my uncle. He provided for his family. They all knew they were loved. He never gave them any trouble. He was always very low key. Not a big social animal. Always very generous. We all owe him a lot. When I get low, I tend to go onto eBay and buy another Subbuteo catalogue. Guess what I’m about to do.
I’ve just ordered a third decaf latte, as if this was pre-March 2023 before the dramatic price rise. A new waiter, with a pig-like cast to his face, is puzzled by my order. Even when I made the request in Portuguese and pointed to the glass. He left my empty glass here after scratching his nose several times, the inner left nostril at one point which I think suggests the scratch became more of a pick and also, in the hospitality industry, visually, you don’t really want to see that.
He's wearing THE café jumper, navy blue v-nick with the small livery on the right side of the chest, but has a white t-shirt underneath, rather than the standard white collared shirt of the other waiters, and a big stain on the back of the left shoulder. I’m beginning to think this guy’s life is maybe at a difficult juncture, hence him taking this job.
The Beard comes over again. We chat about Tuchel taking the Bayern job. I have this bugbear about former Dortmund alumni ending up at Bayern. The heart of the fine Dortmund side of a decade ago was stripped clean by Bayern. If I was a Dortmund player or coach, I’d never join Bayern. I’m all about the underdog. Success shouldn’t come easy. I say to The Beard, imagine if a CostaStarNero turned up next door. Would he walk away from the fine (if expensively priced coffee now) they make here at this independent café? There is merit in fighting the power rather then being the power. The Bayerns will always win. There is little notable in being part of a team of serial winners.
I left the café shortly after 17:30, not before Seb K, the café’s greatest ever coffee maker, the late owner aside, was regaling newer staff with stories of the late owner’s husband who was a bit of a character. The staff were mesmerised. The late-life George Best lookalike is still around, as far as I know, living in Pimlico, albeit with a serious condition, Parkinson’s I think, that stops him from coming to the café these days.
Late-Life George Best always used to stand by the entrance to the bar, nearest side to the door, and there was a moment I last saw him in the café, looking vastly diminished, where the regular bar flies, in tribute and acknowledgement of his status in the café’s history, made way for him to assume his old spot at the bar.
He always wore tank tops, blue overalls if he was fixing the regularly busted door handle or the wall-mounted TV above the swing saloon doors, with the bar flies always looking on as if it was the most interesting thing in the world. In the end, I heard the late owner had banned him from the café as he had a roving eye for the opposite sex, which was one reason that for my first decade and a half there, they only ever employed one front of house female. She was a striking statuesque girl and I suspect her presence there confirmed to the Late Owner that employing female staff was a bad idea when Late-Life George Best was around.
My abiding memory of Late-Life George Best is the never forgotten morning in the spring of 2013 when, having my breakfast BEFORE the café opened (they always let me in early), the flooded loos carried out raw effluence as I was polishing off the café’s outstanding Portuguese toast. I finished that breakfast with my bag on the table, feet off the chairs, cut off by the waste as Late-Life George Best struggled to bring it all under control.
What a moment in THE café’s near thirty-year history.
I barely kept my breakfast down in those final moments.
I finally got back to the flat just after 18:30hrs, too late for the park run, unless I fancied getting locked in the park again. I’ll try and run things off at some point tomorrow.
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