I did a semi–Grand Slam of Brixton’s crap shops today by popping into Iceland and Poundland, keeping the visits on the shorter side of short. Predictably, there was a fight about to break out in the latter. What is it about some people that they just behave as you expect them to behave?
It’s been another depressing day, weather-wise. It’s as if we’ve now lost our four seasons. It’s summer or winter, and nothing else. The transitional seasons, like the male centre parting, now belong to an earlier age. We didn’t have an autumn last year and right now, spring is definitely not establishing itself this year.
The reason for those trips to the Brixton shops that are unlikely to lift your spirits is that I’m always trying to break into change so I can limit what tip I give them in THE café since their hefty price rises early last month. I’ve gotten used to life in the back-up café and it’s nice I found a back-up café after looking for five years once the café made its curious decision to close every Tuesday back in 2018, but the back-up café was only ever meant to be that, a back-up for Tuesdays. Now the place I consider home has become the back-up, and an expensive one at that.
As it is, despite a couple of purchases, I don’t have the right kind of change I wanted for the tip. It was meant to be a decent tip, but nothing more than that. Tonight though, I’ll try and get Nepal to take my payment. He hasn’t been here long enough to have an idea on what my tipping history is like, whether tonight’s tip will be an accurate reflection of who I am, have been, in here, or whether it simply highlights some steep career decline.
In other news, THERE IS STILL NO HAND WASH IN THE GENTS…
It is pretty empty this afternoon in THE café. I had one appointment fall through today which meant my afternoon has been messed up, and this evening I have to see my aunt and uncle. My aunt has now decided, after thirty years in her place, that she wants to put some blinds up in the front room so they can see the TV during the summer.
Seb K stands behind the bar chatting with the newest of the Waitresses and Nepal. Nepal doesn’t speak Portuguese. This is a new development in THE café. There are several such staff now, including a flame-haired, pale English kid, lots of ink, who’s been working behind the bar during the evenings now for at least a couple of years. This gives THE café an international feel it was previously lacking, but at the same time it’s losing something.
As Seb K speaks in English to the newer staff, I can’t help but wonder at how he feels to be one of the last staff standing from the old days, a time when he was one of the first Portuguese waiters who could actually speak English. As the only original member of Kid Cop to see out the show’s full 12-year run, the seminal US Cop show that co-starred myself and (originally) Victoria Principal, I know what it’s like to feel like the one that’s been left behind by colleagues who’ve moved on.
Now I do like a latte, and I often take stick from readers or people on the Facebook page over my milky coffees, but even I would accept today’s opening latte is the wrong side of milky. It’s as pale as I used to look coming off the coach every Friday at school when we used to travel to Morden for Games, the demon Games teacher that originally took us in the early years unsettling every kid in my year.
The guy was awful, threatening to pull our uncomfortable Bukta sports shorts down in winter if he was able to discern we were wearing underwear. This he threatened to do in front of the sole female teacher who came to Games (it was an all-boys Catholic school). My abiding memory of the guy, apart from the time he pushed me into the showers, aged 11, in my Games kit, was him having to scrub off some well-merited graffiti from the walls of the old school proclaiming ‘K***y is a c**t’.
I later heard he killed himself some years later.
16:38hrs
I’ve just sighted The Mullet. While the hair is a little dated, it’s still great hair. Thick, straight, greased back, with the mullet it’s coup de grace. The beard is thicker than I’ve seen it, the kind of thick beard where when a man talks, you just see a hole in the middle of the beard, but no sign of the lips.
As I’ve typed that last paragraph, our eyes locked. The Mullet was scratching his beard – beards can itch – looking at me somewhat forlornly. While we get on well, I think so far that relationship is limited to chatting at the table or the bar. I didn’t know if I was supposed to acknowledge his look from a distance of some eight metres. I’m assuming that when we do chat (inevitable the miserable weather will dominate the SMALL talk), we won’t acknowledge the odd moment that just passed.
Disappointingly, by 16.47hrs, the latte was rapidly cooling down, just 32 minutes after I’d been served.
17:13hrs
I exchange a rapid thumbs-up with The Mullet as he notices my empty tall glass. The decaf is imminent.
17:17hrs
Nepal brings over the second latte. Maybe The Mullet was embarrassed by our earlier exchanged glance.
I had thought, feared, that Seb K would be gone from the café by now, reunited permanently with his family in Porto. But this long goodbye seems to be stretching beyond what most of us had hoped for, and for now, THE café retains its greatest ever coffee maker. It’s a bit like Liverpool managing to hang onto Luis Suarez for three and a half years a decade or so ago, but without that drama as the outstanding but troublesome Uruguayan striker constantly sought a move to Barcelona. It’s like that, but without Seb K being that keen to get away that he’d rather move onto another UK café before he finally leaves these shores, just to get away from this place, as Suarez attempted to do in the summer of 2013 when he tried to move to Arsenal.
That’s a clunky last sentence but I’m on the way to my aunt and uncle’s, so I’ll need to fix it later.
Just a quick heads up. I am trying to work out how I make this audio (not a podcast) work.
My rebooted Patreon page is here and the full audio episodes will, for now, be exclusive to that page starting later tonight. Ideally, I want to keep Substack mainly for my writing. The idea behind these coffee missives has been to find myself in a position where months from now, I might be in a position to cull another book from what is effectively a journal.
I just had a quick look at the weather for the next week. There’s supposed to be a significant improvement. The forecast was similarly good a fortnight ago and that turned out to be a false dawn.
All right, that’s me done here. I want to keep this transaction short, give them the small tip and get out. Sometimes I think it’s just better to be ruthless and not tip rather than tip frugally.
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