On occasion, business forces Sancho and me south of the Border into the sparsely inhabited wilderness areas known to its pitiful and scattered inhabitants as the Home Counties.
Cafés and coffee shops are truly hard to find in this apocalyptic zone. Those few businesses in this cursed area are often backward compared to the cutting-edge establishments of the Finneston Strip or Stockbridge but on occasion a PMiaV and his compadre must have refreshment.
Thus it was that Sancho and I entered the shoutily-named 94 Coffee Shop – 94 Coffee Shop! – in what I later came to realize was a hyper-critical nationalist frame of mind, homesick and ready to take offence.
To me 94 Coffee Shop seemed to be a perfectly pleasant café of the flat-colour-tasteful-eggshell-feature-panelled-neutral-interior-meets-mild-minimalist-touches varietal. Metal chairs were crowded around long tables and a well-distressed green dresser was filled with purchasable arty bits. We ordered, planted ourselves on a wooden much-cushioned window seat and made ready.
The view outside 94 CS encompassed an extravagant selection of fantastical Mock-Tudor houses. These architectural big beasts lurked along Waddeston High Street in a monied display of a very particular kind of taste. Inside No. 9 (tee-four) we were happy to pass quite a few minutes observing an engaging baby and its wranglers. Our coffee and sandwiches (£18.45, hmm) arrived leisurely. My pastrami sandwich seemed to have shrunk to the smaller end of the Earl and my permissible sandwich scale but was filled with such joyous and powerful horseradish that I was rendered speechless and weeping. Which my companion much enjoyed. This wee sarnie was sort of good in a memorable way. Unfortunately the coffee was so unremarkable that I find myself unable to remark upon it. Then I happened to glance Sancho-ward…
My companion was seriously underwhelmed by 94. The famous lowering (rhymes with scouring) brow lowered. Colour flared in the magnificent, glacial cheekbones. The grey eyes flashed.
‘Why,’ she wondered quite loudly in what her close associates know to be a most dangerous manner, ‘Is this coffee in a glass. It’s not a latte.’
Was it just me or did the room fall silent? You could have heard a pin drop. Or a glass. Perhaps not a cup.
I offered a possible explanation based on local customs and respecting them but this was brushed contemptuously aside. Sancho wanted a cup and saucer for her flat white. The woman must be heard.
The charming baby left. So did most of the other customers. Now 94 Coffee Shop had 94 problems but a baby ain’t one.
Sancho’s gaze swept the room, alighting triumphantly on a slightly pretentious wall-mounted butcher’s paper roll with today’s specials inscribed upon it. The Emperor’s thumb was extended, hovered and then pointed decisively towards the ground. Metaphorically I mean. Sancho herself was unmoving as she delivered judgement:
‘They can’t spell turmeric.’
Sometimes, these little pieces I divert myself and you with just write themselves.
Sancho and I mounted up and drove towards the North. I reflected that 94 Coffee Shop was a pleasant but unremarkable café. One could do worse.
As the miles mounted and we headed back towards civilization I could not help but turn it over in my mind again and again…
They can’t spell tumeric.
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