We are beyond the halfway point of January which gladdens my heart. There are two months of the year I don’t like. January is the first. February I simply don’t like because I will understandably forever associate it with the worst day of my life. January, every day could be filled with something brilliant, and I still wouldn’t like it for the simple reason it’s the start of the year, the weather is miserable and it’s such a comedown after the build up to Christmas.
December was unusually exciting for me until the final ten days or so nosedived spectacularly but at least I had several weeks that had me feeling better about things.
I have been struggling to keep warm. I have thrown everything at the socks market. Swedish Nordic socks, £15. Rubbish. Heated socks a twice the price have gone back to Amazon. Running with cold feet is just a surreal and deeply uncomfortable experience and of course, as I have discovered, you can cause untold damage. My scaling back the running dramatically, I have got nowhere near the level of pain I was in for a few days last month.
I have gigs tonight and tomorrow that I picked up during the week and the gig calendar for what’s left of winter and spring is beginning to build up. I’ve set myself an ambitious (for January) target of ten shows this month and am desperate to hit that. Even if I have to do some shows I should’ve left behind a while back, right now I’m inclined to do them just to hit that target. Even if it means going back to a particular weekend gig in Croydon. Again, I’m doing all this without even really enjoying it.
Trying to grow my historical football podcast is proving a slog but all the effort is paying off a tiny bit. The monthly downloads are inching about 1/5 of where they need to be for the show to start making money. It’s hugely ambitious on my part as a lone wolf and I even put the well-known podcast platform that hosts the show to the sword over their lack of support for tiny shows like man. They accepted my argument that it’s a stunning lack of long-term thinking on their part in focusing all their attentions on the mainstream shows. If you push the lone-wolf podcasts like man, with that promotion, the show will come to the attention of listeners unaware of the podcast and get closer to making money for both the creator and the platform.
Here in THE café, a table of four finds an extra table added to their twin tables to afford them more space. This flexibility on rearranging tables wasn’t there a decade ago and fits in with the flexibility on the uniform too. The late owner’s son, THE café’s de facto leader these days will wear jeans with his white shirt, which reminds me of the school uniforms in peak-era Neighbours.
The erstwhile Veteran Waitress, who I think still puts in the odd Saturday morning shift here, arrives for an afternoon espresso which she downs within minutes of it finally arriving. No one ever delivered more lattes to me in my 22.5 years here. I try to catch her eye so I can get the ‘Hello’ out of the way but find it difficult. At one point I find myself mouthing the ‘Hello’ but get only to the first ‘l’ before realising she’s not even looking.
The Mullet meantime brings my own latte over, coughing open mouthed as he does, a unique delivery style in any era, more so post pandemic. We chat briefly and I wonder what the Veteran makes of my ease with the waiters these days because previous to the pandemic, apart from a good relationship with one or two waiters, especially Southpaw, the waiter with the low-slung left-handed tall glass delivery style back in 2013-16, I never chatted to anyone here until the pandemic reinforced just how isolated I’d become over a number of years.
To be fair to me, the waiters of old weren’t that friendly, and most of them had terrible English, unlike this generation, so establishing any kind of rapport with them wasn’t easy. In my early years here, I did row with a number of them, the days when I was a little too cocksure at times. You think you’re going to live forever. Success is imminent and sustainable and nothing else can hurt you because of the significant bereavements you’ve experienced at a too early age. 22.5 years later you realise how wrong you were about pretty much everything.
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