Iced water in November, stray table hair, rebuilding and shrapnel-link
Tuesday in the back-up café
I’ve been wearing the winter coat the last couple of days, not because it’s cold, but because my spring jacket, the outer layer I’ve been wearing during this mild winter, with a hoodie underneath, fell on a rather dirty floor on Saturday/Sunday morning’s Gong show. As did the balaclava. Both went in the wash yesterday.
Clearly the world is boiling up. This mild winter confirms it. If it wasn’t for the concern over energy bills though, I’d rather have a classic cold winter than this regular rain we’re getting. Rain always quashes my mood. I’ve got an expensive trip to a gig in New Malden tonight. Trying to finance the stand-up career by selling my other creative work, well, that definitely isn’t working out right now. No surprises there. It’s all about big names these days. Ideally today, given tonight’s transport costs, I’d have stayed in, but given my mood, and given the rain, for the sake of my wellbeing it was imperative I got out for a coffee and some writing.
I’d had the usual early start this morning after a terrible night’s sleep. That was down to a combination of listening to my favourite paranormal podcast, The Unexplained with Howard Hughes (another podcaster who regularly bangs on about being skint), which featured one of its most unsettling episodes of the last couple of years. My sleep suffered further as I kept going over possible Star Wars Football transfers in my head as the start of the new season arrives. So often I’ve put players in the wrong clubs and I’m constantly weighing up who needs what, and whether that team’s needs can be accommodated. For example, last season, the current Christmas Cup holders Death Star were way too light on experience. Only six of the squad were veterans from the pre-Silver Age era (classified as 2019 onwards), so this close season, I’ve tried to bolster the experience within their ranks. I’ve now addressed this successfully, I think.
Tuesday is of course back-up café day. Double Denim brought over my latte, eventually, as I sat myself down, wet from the rain despite the big winter coat. The clip-on fur was removed from the hood in 2019 when, after 3 years, I finally realised the visually hindering fur could be unclipped. The coat does look odd without the hood fur. Think Aslan when he has his mane removed in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. DD also brought over a cold glass of water with ice. It’s November. What’s this guy thinking? Now I feel I need to make a dent in that glass of water just to keep the moody Italian happy. Not to mention the water intake complicates the bladder management all men of a certain vintage need to get to grips with at some point.
It was 12 minutes before the drinks finally arrived. I thanked DD.
“Anytime,” he said in that deep smoky voice.
He wasn’t wrong, I thought to myself.
He will deliver at any time.
Of his choosing.
The latte, as you milkphobes can see, is darker than normal today, not to mention a little lukewarm too. This is not the kind of barista who will welcome any request for some extra hot milk.
I like my coffee like I like my flats.
Hot.
In both cases, that rarely happens.
If this was more than my back up café, they’d probably have a better idea of how I want my coffee. Maybe I’d have made an effort to build up a rapport with Double Denim, though I don’t doubt it would be hard work. For both of us. While this is ‘only’ a backup café, I should say right now I do enjoy coming here. There’ve been some big gains mentally this year. New friends, a promising stand-up venture, and I’ve finally resolved the longstanding issue of what to do on a Tuesday.
If I could actually make some money, this would’ve been a year to remember.
I’ve taken a second sip of the latte. It’s a little too strong for my liking. If I was a regular here, just to revisit that train of thought, and these strong coffees were a regular thing in this neck of the weed-reeking south London woods, I’d definitely have to do something about it.
Right now, a bigger priority to address is my exit from the regular café’s tomb-like gents. This curious loo, which long-time listeners and followers of my café-related postings over the last couple of decades will know, has a curious arrangement involving a urinal right next to a bowl in the only cubicle offered. I’ve never seen this replicated elsewhere. If the café, back in 2004 when they refurbished the eatery and put in this new loo thought they were ahead of their time lavatory-wise and that they would come to be seen as pioneers on this front, they were very much mistaken. There’s no space in there for the smooth turnaround exit.
You aim your stream into the urinal. You turn, to exit, in my case grabbing loo roll to avoid touching the door handle, but because space is at such a premium, I’m finding that I keep scraping the back of my calf on the adjacent toilet bowl as I turn. In my favour is that I NEVER wear my outdoor clothes indoors (maddening for any girlfriends over the years) so I’m never going to be sat on a sofa, say, with the toilet-afflicted spot of my jeans making contact with the furniture. Still, it’s something to work on.
See, I like this. The writing I mean. Just opening up a Word doc and composing something for you. An hour ago, I was at home, feeling low because of the weather, struggling to get to grips with these new exercises the physio had given me (he’s now been emailed), and here I am now, feeling much brighter and looking forward to the rest of the day. On the physio, quickly, I’m not sure he'll agree to my request to be shown in person how to do some of these exercises owing to the fact we both wore the same top at least week’s initial meeting. He may want to move on from that.
I’ll be gigging again tonight with my friend Sean. We’ve both got ten-minute spots and I’m hoping, if there’s a decent-sized audience, to film our sets. And then I’ve got the late-night bowl of porridge to look forward to. Today’s Guardian, poncy and earnest as ever, is talking about making your own porridge. F*** that middle class nonsense. 75p will buy you a 1k bag of rolled oats from Lidhell. Add Long Life milk, some budget Blueberries from Tesco or Asda, a spoonful of honey, whack it in the microwave for four minutes, you’ve got your porridge. Stop being a f***ing ponce.
Over to my right, two women, one late-middle aged, the other slightly younger, are chatting over their coffees.
“I don’t like Richard Curtis,” says the older one.
Hearing that, I ask myself whether I do or not. I’m neutral, I think. I still have a soft spot for ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’, partly because Hugh Grant’s curtains revived the 1990 Madchester/Italia ’90 hairstyle that held sway among the nation’s under-30s males in what was probably the best time of my life. ’94 ran ‘90 close but was ultimately painful with a few things that happened in my personal life, but it was still memorable. And Four Weddings was a part of that. Andie MacDowell to this day gets stick over her performance in that film, but I maintain that criticism is misplaced. I was always a fan. Partly, I’ll admit, because I had a crush on her, but that aside, she’s still a good actor.
The music in this place probably has the edge on THE café. Mood music, perhaps straying into Yacht Rock at times, but ultimately more engaging than the poppier stuff you get hit with in SW8 and unlikely to lead to any ear worms. More instrumental, like the kind of stuff 80s synth duos would start playing live once they decided they didn’t want to do pop anymore and moved into pseudo-jazz. I love it when creators have the courage, sometimes misplaced, admittedly, to abandon what they’re known for, and risk alienating their audience, to do something different. Think Tears for Fears and Talk Talk. The latter’s incredible ‘Spirit of Eden’ album, a result of numerous jamming sessions, leading to one of the funniest ever music anecdotes I’ve ever heard when the late Mark Hollis told the record label the album couldn’t be played live because there’d been so many jamming sessions, no one had any idea how to play the tracks live. Seriously, that’s just brilliant. That’s what happens when a record label gives a band carte blanche over the output.
Look at this: three pages of a word doc inside 28 minutes. I must be bi-polar. 90 minutes ago, my mood was low. Sure, today will cost me (tipping just 20p here this lunchtime) but I did the right thing getting out.
At the weekend, feeling low in-between two challenging gong gigs, a friend sent me a rather helpful and very articulate voice note, telling me that I needed to avoid defining myself by things such as the gong shows and look at how I was slowly transforming my life. I was away from stand-up comedy for nine years because of crippling stage fright. This year, I’ve already done over 100 shows. The stage fright has gone. I’m now off my meds for the first time in nearly five years. I can set up seven mouse traps in thirty seconds. If there was a World Cup for setting traps, I’d be the dark horse going into that tournament. I’m slowly rebuilding my life, turning things around, and shouldn’t allow myself to be brought down by any bad nights on the circuit. The gist of the message was that life-wise, I was starting to pick up a few important wins. I appreciated that. The fact the message had come from a wordsmith carried extra resonance. I found myself wondering why I couldn’t feel these wins myself, but the fact is, he helped me to see it. It’s good to have people like ‘The Philosopher’ in your life.
I sip some of the iced water Double Denim brought over, immediately berating myself for doing so. If he notes I’m taking some of the water, then these glasses of water will never end. Short term, it might be an idea to leave them untouched, possibly irking him, in order to bring this to an end. Or it may be that I can suffer this once a week. Make a little effort with the water, take a few sips, and come next summer, if I’m still knocking around, come the inevitable nowadays heatwave, I don’t have to ask for the glass of iced water. It just gets delivered automatically. Regardless, Double Denim seems obsessed with iced water.
One last thing to report on the first latte. As Double Denim brought over the coffee, and the unasked-for iced water, I noted a small hair just by my saucer. The question is, was this his? The Italians, like all southern Europeans, tend to be a hirsute lot. Or did the stray hair belong to the guy who was previously sat here when I arrived? I didn’t get a good look at him, so I can’t be sure.
The sweetener sachet-placement approximately denotes the spot where the stray body hair landed.
In a curious reversal of the SW8 café’s usual WC hygiene issues, one of the cubicles here has no water coming from the taps but does offer handwash. These places never seem to get the WC situation right. I think I’d rather have the water than the handwash, if I was forced to choose.
I see Double Denim deliver a coffee to another table, right-handed. The customer, a 60-something man who, unusually for his generation, is of a height that you normally only see on a basketball court, thanks him.
“Anytime,” responds the moody Italian.
See, if I was a barista, this is where I would stand out. I’d have bespoke responses for different customers. Anyone within earshot of the ‘anytime’ might easily be disappointed at realising that everyone gets the ‘anytime’. So, I might give someone the ‘anytime,’ but the next table would get, ‘pleasure’. Someone else might hear a ‘you’re okay’, while others might experience a ‘enjoy it’.
My second latte arrives. As you can see, the froth is a little bigger on this second coffee, though colour-chart wise, that’s back to what I want from my coffee.
As Double Denim places the tall glass and saucer on the table, I thank him.
“Anytime.”
As soon as he’s gone, I scan the table for any further stray hairs. We’re all-clear this time.
Double Denim asks Basketball Height Pensioner if he wants the front door closed as there’s a draft coming in. The tall man tells him he’s not feeling the cold. Double Denim decides nevertheless to close the door. I can see, even from the back of this cavernous café, that the rain is still coming down. It’ll be a relief to get out tonight. I can see my mood dropping this afternoon soon as I’m home if this weather deteriorates further.
I’ve just twigged that much like an action figure, and often like me to be fair, Double Denim is always in the same clothes. Unless he has duplicate denim shirts. Clearly, he likes this look and thinks it works for him. And it may do. Everyone in here is either in a jumper or a coat but the double-denim one eschews the extra layer, perhaps through vanity or, more than likely, the café’s huge space means all that walking to and from tables is enough to keep him warm and from needing a jumper.
I think his exit greetings could do with a little work. As two regular customers leave, he gives them an “All the best,” like he’s never going to see them again. It seems rather final.
The plan for the rest of the day before venturing out to the Surrey gig is to do a couple of light rehearsals. Think through some more of the potential Star Wars transfer moves and have a workout. I’m glad I’m not due a run today. Not in this wet weather.
I pack up my stuff and scan the table once more, hunching slightly, as if I was about to play a difficult snooker shot, to see if I can spot anymore stray hairs.
I give a 26p tip today, but as I leave, I find myself worrying that at some point, Double Denim, going through the day’s tip money box will spot the 1ps and make the links between the shrapnel and my weekly visits.
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