Bad news today. For me, not you. After today, the café doesn’t reopen until 6 January, the day of the Three Kings on the Iberian Peninsular, and beyond, perhaps. I wouldn’t say I’m gutted. I’m too tired for that. But I guess knowing the back-up café is there for me now salves this wound somewhat.
Every year since the late owner’s passing, it’s hard to work out how long the café is going to be closed for in the summer and now Christmas. ‘Back in the day’, it would open regardless. Christmas Day, sure it would be closed, but I’ve been here on many Christmas Eves after recording and releasing my old Bumper Christmas Annual podcasts. I’ve been here on Boxing Days, New Year’s Eves and New Year’s Days. In fact, it was this last one that arguably began my slow evolution from introvert to pandemic-era raconteur here in the café.
While the back-up café is definitely filling that Tuesday-gap in my life (this will make sense to regular readers/listeners), it still saddens me that the café will be closed for a prolonged period over the festive weeks. This place has really carried me through some difficult Christmases, none more so than Christmas 2010, covered in my 2013 6-part series for Resonance ‘The Letter’.
This morning, a tall white woman in a Russian Fur Hat, mid-thirties at a push, and who I’ve never seen in here before, is chatting at the top of her voice to a colleague, their four-seater table covered in paperwork. They’re sifting through some job applications. I know this because theirs is the dominant café audio right now. I think if you’re new to a place, you should be aware of the hierarchy in a venue and modulate your audio. For instance, I’ve only been in the back-up café since July/August time. I wouldn’t go in there and raconteur at the top of my voice. I’m too new for that. I need to earn that, if I were so inclined.
So that New Year’s Day thing. Let me take you back to 2015. The old year had ended badly with one of the most difficult nights I can ever remember having with any partner. I was up early and made my way to the café, alone, trying to work out where this left things. It had been the kind of bad night you never forget, regardless of whether your life might move onto a happier phase in future. As you get older, even if and when things don’t work out, knowing how short life is, you only wish your exes the best and hope that their next relationships work out and manage to avoid the pain of such a night as that New Year’s Eve.
I was kicking off 2015 having the usual lattes and Portuguese toast, which had become a favourite treat since the terrible winter of 2010. Southpaw, possibly my favourite waiter of all in my near-22 years here, with the low, left-handed tall glass delivery, was still here and we chatted regularly over at my toilet table (removed post-lockdown). That low hanging delivery always put me in my mind of a Brendan Ingle fighter, Herol Graham, Prince Naseem, their arms at their side, daring the opposing boxer to stick one right on their kisser.
As I reluctantly packed my stuff up and prepared to make my way back home to try and resolve the issues from the previous night, on exiting the café, another regular, arguably the hardest customer in my decades here and a reformed football hooligan from the game’s darkest days, with the job-ending neck tattoos long before they became inexplicably fashionable (he stopped coming here some 4 or 5 years ago, frustrated by some of the poor service from the waiters), was standing outside having a cigarette. He just gave me the ‘Happy New Year’, standard I guess on a New Year’s Day, but extraordinary to me because by then we’d been ignoring one another for the best part of 13-14 years. I tried not to show my surprise and returned it, and the following day, we built on that initial greeting and very quickly we were on first name terms and chatted regularly up until the pandemic. I’d often see him early mornings as I prepared to come into the café as it opened (or actually, before it opened, Phil Collins raising the shutter a little for both the Fissures and I to duck under and come in half an hour before it officially opened.
And that’s the final post of the year from the SW8 café.
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