All I Want For Christmas Is A Good Coffee Shop

 

I miss writing in coffee shops. I don't even like coffee that much, I just like the way that being in a coffee shop seems to focus my mind to the task. Maybe it's the ambience, maybe it's the trope of writers in coffee shops, or perhaps even inhaling the caffeine fumes, but it just works for me. 

My first experience of writing in a coffee shop was when I spent some months in Helsinki as a student. I can't quite remember the name of the place - I feel like it was called Jacob's or Jimmy's or something like that - but I went there all the time. I remember it was just up a side street from the railway station square and was the kind of place with free magazines for you to read, fifteen minutes of free internet access and they had free water dispensers infused with lemon or cucumber. All of this was like a gift from the Gods to a penniless student, as you can imagine. So whenever I needed a break from my humourless German flatmate or an escape from the November cold I would settle in with my one purchased coffee and my notebook. 

In recent years I've tried all sorts of places. Morrisons' café while waiting for my car to be serviced - this is strangely okay, it's anonymous and nobody seems to notice if you sit there for ages. The local Caffè Nero, where you feel a bit more conspicuous but there is a lot more bustle and characters for inspiration. I tried writing in a nearby service station that has a Costa, but there was maybe too much inspiration there. Streams of rowdy hockey teams fresh off the bus, businessmen talking loudly into their mobiles, and mums corralling sweaty, screaming toddlers from the car to the loos could sometimes be overstimulating to say the least. 

I've never found my dream coffee shop in the UK, nothing has come close to Jacob's or Jimmy's. I still persevere though - sometimes just getting out of the house is enough to make me actually sit down and get on with it, to treat it as my 'office hours'. Even if there are biscuit crumbs all over the sticky formica table and there's a coach party of rugby lads nursing hangovers marching through.

I have a wish list though, and it looks like this.

• It needs to be quiet, but not so quiet that it's just me and the barista looking nervously over at each other when I haven't ordered a cup of coffee in the past hour.
• The lighting must be relaxing. Not dark enough that I'd struggle to find the space bar on my laptop, but also not with strip lighting so intense that it's more frazzling than the coffee.
• A table in a corner where I can turn my laptop away from prying eyes, but also with a view of the window. I hate people peering at what I'm writing but I do like to be able to spy on passers by. No I'm not a hypocrite, you are.
• Quiet music, pitched at just the right volume that it's not as silent as an exam hall, but that I barely notice it's there. The last thing I need is to be inadvertently writing Coldplay lyrics into my manuscript.
• It should feel safe enough to leave my laptop on the table while I pop to the loo. There's an irony in using a coffee shop to knuckle down to the writing, yet the steady consumption of drinks making half-hourly breaks a necessity.
• The coffee itself is inconsequential. I class the buying of coffee as rent money.

After lockdown is over, I'll resume my search for the perfect coffee shop. Until then, it's me versus the children, the unloaded dishwasher and the draw of Netflix.

LJ