Missing the Coffee Shop.

You know, I haven’t been into a coffee shop since lockdown descended in March 2020. That’s two years without taking my seat in the cinema of life at its most immediate. For that’s what the coffee shop was to me: the place where I could watch anonymous strangers, picking out the occasional interesting specimen in order to observe the human creature going about its business and reporting the observations to these pages.

I still don’t go into coffee shops for several reasons, not least the fact that Covid is on the rise again at the moment. My only window on life now is the news pages beamed from the BBC onto my monitor screen, and there’s little to see there except politicians and people in distress.  It’s edifying only in the fact that it projects a world in a state of inscrutable flux. It’s all so impersonal, producing a sense of anxiety where the intimate nature of the coffee shop once offered a mild form of enlightenment.