Today had been pencilled in as an admin-heavy day with a very narrow window for the creative stuff. I made an early and effective start on the admin – easy to do when you’ve had another sleepless night and your back feels like it’s been kicked by a small horse - but by mid-morning, it had left me a little wound up. One callback was half an hour late and not wanting to be in the flat any longer, I packed my bag, laptop, script (various drafts) and the new Sherlock Holmes pastiche anthology from the library (I suspect I might be the first borrower), and set off for the back-up café. Inevitably, the callback came within moments of leaving the flat and the call ended just doors away from the back-up café.
Happy that was over, I knew I then had four hours before the next call. Well, not quite, there was a voicemail to deal with, but I could figure that one out once cocooned in the back-up café where I was due to cash in a free decaf latte. Only there was a note on their door.
I’m paraphrasing here, but the gist of the note was, owing to a very busy bank holiday weekend, they hoped ‘their wonderful customers would understand they needed a day off’. Given my frugality in there, I’m not sure I’m regarded as one of the wonderful and certainly wouldn’t be if they knew of my instant disdain for the note.
Look, a bank holiday weekend is always likely to be busy so why not just let your customers know the week before that you’re going to close on the Tuesday. It wound me up. It’s a bit like these big clubs wearing unnecessary away strips AT HOME THIS SEASON (especially looking at you, Juventus). I don’t mind admitting I was ****ed off. I crossed the road, my mind not quite with it, and saw a number 2 bus behind me that would take me into South Lambeth and THE café. I ran some three hundred metres to the next northbound bus stop, comfortably caught the bus and then three stops later suddenly remembered THE café closes on Tuesdays since 2018. I’ve never quite gotten used to this nonsense, especially as for my first 17 years in there, it opened 7 days a week and only closed on Christmas Day. But such was the level of my distraction this morning, I was making plenty of mistakes.
I quickly tried to work out what was I doing? Should I just head back home and write the day off? During my peak years, I could easily write from home. It would’ve been no big deal but when you hate living where you live, you need to be out. Or at least, I do. I decided to head for the ‘back-up back-up’ café, just north of THE café, on South Lambeth Road. This was the café I was frequently holed up in on Tuesdays last spring and summer before I discovered the back-up café that relegated this back-up back-up to a near-forgotten third choice. Price-wise it’s reasonable, but the coffee isn’t that good and today was no different.
As the 2 arrived in Stockwell at approximately 12:19hrs, there was the inevitable and unmistakable sight of The Flute Man of SW8. ‘Flute’ was facing the Stockwell memorial, hips moving, as his flute spewed forth what always sounds like the same tune from either the 15th century or the ’93-94 Acid Jazz era.
He had a black hoodie on today with some large icon on the back and the words ‘Queen of Iceni’ emblazoned above it. Watching this Stockwell Hall of Famer whose presence has been noted by everyone, from my aunt and uncle to the kids at the local school (or Academy as most schools tend to be these days – since when wasn’t being a school enough?), I found myself wondering how and when he’d decided that the Stockwell memorial would be his spot for the flute playing and the operatic singing? What was that first moment like back in the summer when he first unleashed his booming voice on the mixture of bedraggled and gentrifying locals. Did he feel as anxious as I felt doing my first gigs?
On the way there, I ran into my old and close friend Micky Blue, the Lambeth caretaker I’ve known since I was four-years-old. This EXPLETIVE-heavy Micky featured in some of the tales in my final years of my old now deceased radio/podcast show Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available. He’s quite the character, and of my close friends, one of the most unreliable and sometimes aggressive pals I have once the drink takes him.
I haven’t seen much of the blue one since the first Lockdown so I’d got off a couple of stops early after sighting him on the bus and walked back on myself to the Baptist Church where a funeral was taking place. Micky Blue was carrying out some work on one of the flats next to it. He looked great. He must be the healthiest-looking heavy smoker in London. We chatted for some ten minutes, during which he clocked up 7 c**ts and 12 f-bombs, which is pretty mild going for him.
We agreed we’d meet up for my upcoming birthday along with a couple of other singleton friends who form a long-tight quartet of the broken, at one time or another, sertraline-taking crew. I’m not a big one for birthdays. I really see nothing fun about turning a year older. I’ve felt that way since 22, but this year I’m just happy to use it as an excuse to sit down with friends I now don’t see so frequently. If it takes a birthday to bring us together now, I can live with that.
The last time we met up for one of my birthdays, a few years ago, the last before lockdown, I was still reeling from my last break-up and it was night that left me even more confused when we ended up in the basement of a Portuguese bar playing pool in a space that was too small to accommodate the pool table. It felt like I was living out one of my favourite ever Seinfeld episodes ‘The Place to Be’, where Frank Costanza (my favourite ever sitcom character), Kramer and ‘The Maestro’ end up playing pool with the Maestro’s baton owing to Frank’s pool room being too small for the table. I used to howl with laughter watching Seinfeld in the 90s and I was never a howler.
Moments after my farewell with the EXPLETIVE-heavy one, I ran into Seb K who was walking into Stockwell. THE café’s greatest ever coffee maker gave me a shy smile and the ‘Dan’ and we went our separate ways. I wonder if despite our lengthy and at times very personal exchanges in THE café post-lockdown, outside of the café he might feel we’re still not quite there yet in terms of being able to have a proper exchange. Like this is still a work-customer relationship.
Maybe.
Micky Blue’s hands had not been in the cleanest order owing to his caretaking work so upon arriving at the back-up back-up café, after placing an order for my first latte, I asked where the Gents was so I could wash my hands. I knew where the loos were, but as I hadn’t been there for 8 months, I figured I’d pretend I’d lost my familiarity with the place.
One of the women, I think she’s Latin, directed me to the basement and told me to watch my head as the ceilings heading to this effective tomb were unusually low. I remembered this, but right away, I still whacked my head on the low ceiling, just like I did on every previous visit here. There is a large full length mirror positioned behind the counter that allows staff to see comings and goings to the loo, and this head bump was sighted as I heard the waitress tell the other one in Spanish, “I told this dick to mind his head on the steps and right away he bangs his head.”
That’s great for the confidence, eh. That insult, by the way, meant I limited my tip to 25p.
On my return to the surface, I took my seat, tried to push the small table close to the wall, only to find it wasn’t quite possible. If you’re like me and work from these places, it’s not going to be easy to keep all your stationery on the table.
A young Japanese guy was sat to my left, super-focused on his lunch, over which he was hunched. His face couldn’t have been more than a foot away from the food. The only time he raised his head was to have a drink, at which point he would pick up his phone and stare at the phone while he necked whatever he was drinking before he resumed staring at his food.
The first coffee was predictably horrendous. One of the reasons this place failed to establish itself as the first choice back-up café was because the coffees are too dark. If you’re going to serve dark coffees, you may as well do away with the milk, surely? I thought I’d leave pulling them up on the lack of milk today as I hadn’t been there for over eight months. But as I struggled with the opening latte, and knowing I’d had such an admin-heavy, pain in the **** day, I was determined there would be something good about my day. I therefore made the point of leaving a tiny bit of the first latte so it would effectively serve as a coffee colour chart when I took up the first (near) empty glass to the counter and asked them for another, but a ‘milky’ one. If they couldn’t quite place me on my return today, that would’ve been the moment when they did recall last year’s milk pedant.
Where is the milk?
To be fair, their coffees were hot. I like a hot coffee. Actually, over the weekend, the back-up café’s second coffee (Easter Sunday) was especially hot. I savoured this. I like my hot drinks to be HOT. I want them to trigger a facial. I want them to be uncomfortable to swallow. That’s how I like my coffee.
As the second milky latte (I forgot to even ask for decaf today) came over, a woman behind me, like so many locals slightly ‘touched’ in the head, dressed in a US Civil War Confederate uniform-like outfit, complete with Confederate hat, walked up to the counter with a small bowl of fries and complained that the portion was smaller than usual. A back and forth ensued but Confederate wasn’t backing down.
Some ten minutes later, a bigger portion of fries was delivered to Confederate. She was told she’d be charged an extra pound. She wasn’t having that and strode over to the counter.
“I’ve lived here for two decades. Just do it as you did before.”
I wasn’t hanging around to see how this all panned out in the end, though I’d be surprised if the back-up back-up café wrung the extra pound out of her.
I’d had a reasonably productive session on the script, given how messy the day had been, but I couldn’t wait to leave. Tomorrow will be better as I return to THE café where I’m looking to cash in a free latte.
One of many SW8 alleyways.
Footnote
As I cut through Mawbey Brough to get onto the northern end of Wandsworth Road, I heard a Portuguese Woman on her phone talking about how she’d just been to ‘Sanboories’. This is how the Mediterranean community in London has always pronounced ‘Sainsbury’s’. I still say ‘Sanboories’ when conversing with my Spanish aunt and uncle. The old large Stockwell store on Clapham Road, criminally closed down in the otherwise halcyon summer of ’90 (it really was the best thing there’s ever been in Stockwell in my lifetime, one place where you could do a proper shop and to this day never replaced in the area) was a huge part of everyone’s lives.
The weekly ‘Sanboories’ shop dominated the lives of many Stockwell residents. It was about thirty years before I discovered that the reason the store was closed down was because residents on the local estate complained of the noise from delivery vans, but that can’t be true. First, why would you do yourself out of that best supermarket Stockwell ever had? Secondly, the store was immediately replaced by The Food Hall (my sibling worked there and I used to have to pick them up on a Saturday night) and later a Budgens. Those supermarkets would also have their deliveries, so this, as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t hold water.
Maybe, having opened their original leviathan Nine Elms store – still superior to the too-big nonsense that opened in its place in 2017, Head Office didn’t think there was any need for two big stores in SW8 and 9. Stockwell though never recovered from losing its ‘Sanboories’. Don’t get me started on those overpriced local stores.
And here’s my ‘Sansboories’ soundscape.
If you want to briefly pass yourself off as a Mediterranean in south London, then why not record your own MP3 of ‘Sansboories’ for this Substack, email them over and I’ll stick them up on here over the coming days. Of course, this could be one of those feature ideas I used to come up with for Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available which never came off and which I usually did my best never to mention again.
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By coincidence, I sold a stock image of 'Sanboories' Nine Elms last week, which I think I took in 2017. Quite bizarre. Out of respect for my tuga friends, I'm not going to do a mock Portuguese accent but I think they'd go for 'Sanboureez'