Recall #2

The Café Soci­ety Years. Remem­ber them?

These days we hang out in pubs that are always too noisy, and we long to find a quiet one where we can actu­ally talk. Or we act all grown up and go to res­taur­ants. But I still have those fond memor­ies of cafés hid­den away in the most unusual loc­a­tions. We would spend hours in there, from mid-afternoon to early even­ing, drag­ging out a cup of cof­fee for the longest time. Talk­ing. Star­ing out of the win­dow. People-watching (with added doses of bitch­ing). Big plans. Small lives. And barely a ten­ner between us.

Nine or ten years later, we’ve got Star­bucks, Cof­fee Repub­lic, Costa Cof­fee and Mega­Corp Froth Stops, where sci­ence degrees are required to even begin order­ing a cof­fee. Oh, and I can’t bring myself to say “to go”, either. This means that not enough people are going to cafés, and they don’t know what they’re missing.

Dur­ing our Café Soci­ety Years, there were never enough hours in the day to do all we wanted — which was, mostly, very little. Often, we would won­der where all the time went. I still won­der; and the hole in this story is that I don’t know if you’re won­der­ing where all the time went too.