It was a quiet bank holiday weekend, as they usually are with me. This upcoming spate of bank holidays always leave me down. We just need to spread them out more throughout the year. Why do we need them all in the spring and summer? This is a regular refrain of mine. We’ve already had two in recent weeks where the weather’s not been great, so why not have one or two in the winter months, break up the long cold months?
The above was actually going to make up the spine of any SMALL talk this morning if Muscular engaged me in some dialogue as I arrived here, but he’s busy with colleague Betty Boo, more of whom in a moment.
It's good to be back out writing in the back-up café.
I did feel isolated over the last few days. I managed to run a comfortable 10.5k yesterday, covered in yesterday’s audio over on my Patreon. I felt a little tired in the afternoon and had assumed it would help me to sleep better but I had a dreadful night’s sleep last night.
Bank Holiday Run1kerr action
I think I have too many pillow options and since dropping my regular first choice pillow, with me since the late 90s but these days, like me, a little too flat, I’m moving between a couple of pillows, neither of which are that comfortable.
I remember back in the summer of 2000 when I was clearing out the old family bedsit. It had been such a torrid year, my mum having passed in that same place early in the year, that I had made the decision I could no longer live there. There were 24 years’ worth of memories, some great, some not so great, you know how it is, with one cruel one at the end completely destroying everything that had come before it. Unbeknown to me, my aunt had come along, taken one look at my pillow that day and decided the pillow needed to go. When I found out, I actually rescued it from all the stuff that had been binned.
2000 was a year of huge loss and change. There was no way that was the year to try out a new pillow. Even back then my sleep was bad. What I should’ve done is when I finally got back on my feet emotionally, three or four years later, that’s when I should’ve tried to bring in a new pillow. Instead, just like Jurgen Klopp with his ageing midfield, I clung onto the pillow for too long. I’m not looking to throw it away. I’d be happy to hang onto it, just like (again) Klopp is looking to hang onto influential veteran midfielder James Milner this summer and have it in the background overseeing the development of the newer pillows trying to come in and establish themselves as the new number one.
My first decaf arrives at 09.34hrs. The head’s a little too big, just. Decide for yourself (see picture at the top of this post).
“I stress too much about this place,” says the Muscular Madeiran to Veteran Betty Boo, a dead-ringer (an ageing one) for the old south London singer, who happens to be in here on her day off. Like the muscular one, she seems drawn to this place, even when she’s not working.
Betty Boo, some flashy, expensive headphones around her neck that are likely to be belting out cheesy Italian tunes if the playlist in this place is anything to go by, must be in her forties. It’s often hard to pin down Mediterraneans. A combination of sun and smoking can often make them look significantly older than they are. She works in the kitchens, and I’ve always had the impression she’s a bit of a character. She’s not shy about moaning about perceived slights in front of the customers.
Tuesday tends to be the quietest day in the back-up café. “If it stays quiet,” says Muscular to Boo, “I’m leaving at 3pm today.” No doubt though he’ll be in after that with his rather striking huskie dog. Does that need the ‘dog’ or do you know what I’m talking about just with the ‘huskie’?
Boo maybe fancies her chances at perhaps getting something off the ground with a man likely to be a generation younger than her. The two seem to be moaning about something which must be work-related, helping them to establish some kinship. “If they come at me, they better know when it comes back at them, it comes back hard,” says the Madeiran with dialogue that might have at least survived several drafts before being eventually culled from the shooting script of early NYPD Blue episode ‘back in the day’.
At 09:53hrs, Bizarro World Me comes in and is greeted by both Muscular and Boo by his first name, a ‘NORM’ Cheers moment. Muscular chats to Bizarro at the counter. I’m not sure Bizarro has actually seen his favoured table at the back of the back-up café is taken. Maybe, like me, pre-pandemic, when I walked into THE café to see my toilet table taken, he’s developed a poker face to handle that moment of disappointment.
Boo asks Muscular why he’s talking in an Italian accent. Muscular, a multi-linguist, tells her that as he’s working in an Italian café, he will often switch his register, in this case, to something more theatrical.
10:01hrs
The back-up café is overwhelmed by an unpleasant piscine smell. You know how I feel about fish, if you’re a regular reader. It’s not one of my favourite smells. There is a shop across the road from here, Ocean Breeze, which is more like an Ocean Tsunami of sea stink. In the summer, the smell from that fishmonger is particularly bad. I could be walking down that side of the street, lost in my own world, forgetting to cross over as I usually do just to avoid that stink, and suddenly I know I’ve gone right past it because the malodour smacks me right in the chops.
I look up and one of the fishmongers from Ocean Stink has wandered in to update them on the latest delivery. I just knew…This guy might as well be holding some half-rotting fish right under my nostrils. How might this guy even hold down a relationship smelling like that? I recall a story in the late nineties, sensationalised, I’m sure, in which Chris Tarrant’s wife, speaking about her husband’s cheating, revealed that the keen angler always smelt of fish. Though it seems that maybe this hadn’t been the problem it should’ve been until he cheated on her.
Bizarro, pulling two tables together to make himself a very spacious workstation, reveals in a softy-spoken voice that his paternal grandfather was Italian. The place has only been open for a year but in that time, he’s established himself to the extent that he’s comfortable and confident enough to move the tables. Happy with this makeshift arrangement, he fires up his giant late-00s sized laptop.
Sat behind me, a woman chats on her phone. Her voice reminds me a lot of a mid-90s girlfriend from college. She had a helium-like voice. Every time she called the house, my mum would refer to her as ‘La Muñeca’ (the doll).
Another table hogger, indeed, another writer (surprise, surprise, we are serial coffee nursers) arrives and with a shortage of free spaces, dumps his stuff opposite Bizarro who tells him he has a spare power supply if he needs one.
FLARER arrives just 10:40hrs.
To my left, a pensioner couple take their seats and wait to be served. The woman, sporting an elegant silver bob and multiple rings on her fingers, has a voice that suggests she’s been smoking since her teens. Her husband pulls out his phone and begins playing a video of some children’s birthday party. I find this behaviour in public spaces infuriating. Older people are far more culpable in this than the younger generation and we really should know better. We grew up in the era of headsets. Wear some earphones. Okay, you both want to watch something together, but if you can’t watch it in a public space without sharing an earphone each, wait until you get home. It’s just good manners.
My aunt calls me to find out what time her dental appointment is today. “I wrote it on your calendar,” I tell her.
“I think it’s at 12.20.”
“Yeah, it’s on your calendar.”
This still doesn’t suffice. I find myself having to hang up and check my emails to see when the appointment was booked, and I call her back. My aunt doesn’t really do admin.
I try to catch Muscular’s attention so I can order my second decaf, but the man walks at a hell of a pace through this café. Once he’s on that walk, it’s impossible to halt that momentum.
11:10hrs
Running out of patience for the second latte, I show poor etiquette, asking Flarer for another coffee as he delivers to another table. Ordering the second coffee in this place really tests you.
Coffee Nurser returns from chatting to a friend sat elsewhere in the back-up café and rather than sitting opposite Bizarro on the four-seater, he sits next to him. I reflect that Bizarro might not be happy with that lack of screen privacy. Right now though, he doesn’t seem to care as he talks aloud on his phone. Coffee Nurser may yet regret sitting in such close proximity.
Sat behind them, a bespectacled late-middled aged man, at least 6.4”, half his face a grey haze, leaves the back-up café for the sixth time in less than 80 minutes for another cigarette. Each time Chainsmoker returns, his demeanour seems that more broken, as he makes the walk of shame back to his table reeking of tobacco. This is not a man who wears his height well.
That’s me for today.
It’s been a reasonably productive morning. I’ve booked my coach tickets for Sunday’s 20-minute opening spot in Bournemouth. It’s the first gig I’m travelling to by coach and has me a little unsettled. The coach there had almost sold out so clearly, I’m going to be sat next to someone for two and a half hours. Train journeys are fine. When I gig outside London, if I get a seat, I quite enjoy being able to just focus on the gig ahead, read and write a bit but I’ve always suffered from car sickness. Coach journeys at school were a nightmare for me and I came to dread Fridays. I haven’t done such a long journey now for nine years and that particular trip, despite taking travel sickness pills there and back, didn’t work out too well for me. I’m hoping the travel pills I’ve bought this morning do a better job.
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