I need a lot to get me through the door of my workplace, around an hour and 10 minutes away from my home. It is not a particularly terrible workplace, but it is a workplace, and therefore, notwithstanding, terrible. Like all workplaces, it is essentially a cage for grown-up humans, but a cage which, by any zookeeper’s standards, would be considered inhumane, overcrowded, and potentially unsanitary.
You wouldn’t take 15 (similarly-sized) Sumatran orang-utans, or spectacled bears, and put them at 0.75 metre square desks in a glass fronted office in Hoxton in July, with half a toilet and a water tap four floors down. But, apparently, this is what what we have decided is acceptable for human beings. Admittedly there are Friday donuts, but apart from that and semi-private toilet facilities, we aren’t gaining that much.
Meanwhile, as I discovered upon the occasion of my last visit to London Zoo, at least the incarcerated monkeys get to rub their genitals. But apparently, even that is off limits now, or so HR told me last week.
With such an unappetising prospect ahead, something needs to get me out of bed and across London in the morning. So the walk, train, walk to work must be divided into three coffees. Sticking with the zoological analogies, imagine the classic evolutionary diagram of transformation from slithering beast through knuckle dragging gorilla, to spear carrying cave dweller and finally, upright human. That is my daily journey, aided by coffee. Admittedly, most mornings I stop just before I get to the fully human stage, and also, unlike in the diagram, I tend to wear pants. Again, thanks a bunch, HR.
Coffee, and most of all, the ritual of coffee actually gets me out of bed. It is the only thing I can promise myself in the day that is close enough to feel worth it, and not like some distant and unachievable end to my pain at the end of the day. My partner tells me he often finally gets out of bed because he knows that the sooner he gets up and goes to work, the sooner he can go back to sleep. (Hearing that was when I first knew it was true love.)
So we both leave the house together, usually arguing about where to go on holiday or what to do at the weekend, complaining about the hours that await, and sometimes fantasising about new jobs, or new lives, before realising that all is futile.
Anyway, my first coffee is in my home neighbourhood, Catford. I like my coffee like I like my men: short, brutal, and with a powerful aroma. Finding the right espresso is important. Fortunately, there are options.
Catford has two Costa coffees, and I dare say they make up around 60% of the local economy not otherwise devoted to fried chicken, kebabs, gambling, or heroin. The most recently opened is a somewhat palatial venue that stretches what feels like fifteen miles down the dual carriageway of the high street. An annex of Eastern Europe, it’s full of attractive young gentlemen in leather jackets, gulping black coffees and smoking cigarettes in huddles at the outside tables; meanwhile, inside, groups of young Polish mothers in down coats look tired, and angrily shove push chairs.
My original morning coffee fix came from the more intimate Costa on the Broadway. However, I was at an extremely wild New Year’s Eve party with some of the staff a couple of years ago, and some shit, as the young ones say, went down. After smiling awkwardly at each other in the mornings for a few days after, I decided to switch location.
Coffee #1
This is perhaps why I prefer to go to the greasy spoon for my first double espresso of the morning, for which I have around 7 minutes set aside. It’s run by a handsome, relaxed, but aloof middle-aged Egyptian gentleman. A friendly English woman sorts the orders, knows everyone, and has been known to say things like (to a local drunk who came in asking for another cup of tea) ’It’s lager that’s your problem, love, not tea.’ Every single day she sees us coming, gets the coffees done, lines them up side by side on the counter, and says softly, ‘Allll right guys.’
The trauma of the train is next. The chittering Euroteens heading for the language schools, and commuters heading for their first stroke (that’s me), pile on, seethe and jostle. Meanwhile, the same woman every morning manages to find a seat by sheer will and desperation, and will then get out small bottles from her handbag, proceeding to massage perfumed unguents into her long-nailed hands, her eyes focused on the middle distance. Sometimes there is a small, anxious cocker spaniel who barks in terror if anyone tries to talk to her. She speaks for all of us.
Jostling, seething and shunting
As we pull into Cannon street, we look out over Tower Bridge. There are a few of us who always stand sideways, and look deliberately, longingly, out at the view. I see a few deep breaths, and pauses for reflection. I sometimes suspect that, like me, this is why some of my fellow commuters are still in London. For me, there is always a moment of excitement, born of my 10 year old self, and a sense of pride and delight at my escape from the bleak North: I cannot believe I actually live in London. As we exit the train, and as I queue to leave the platform, I think the same thing, as my 43 year old self, and for different reasons.
London Bridge. Tower bridge lost in fog. (Charcoal on paper.)
Cannon Street station is, like most London stations, completely inappropriate for the job it was built to do. With its white dirty plastic walls, leading to faux marble, it reminds me of a monumental mausoleum if it were run by a 1980s Local Authority. It is without natural light, apart from a patch of glass so dirty, and so obstructed by wire netting, that the sky looks more like an ill-repaired LED screen.
Coffee #2
After queuing to get through the gates, it’s time for another double espresso - it has been at least 35 minutes and I need to keep my buzz. There is a tiny booth Caffè Nero at Cannon Street station. Today, as I approach, a young Italian man leaning on the counter blows a torrent of heavy snot into a branded napkin, throws it, clang, in the bin, snorks, and then barks an echoing, wet-chested cough into his bare hand. He looks at me and nods, ‘Yes please,’ and picks up a takeaway cup with his coughing hand. I’m too tired to argue.
Burrowing through the rivulets and crawlspaces of the City, past the Bank of England, down the drainage channel of Princes Street, up the many-scaffolded shaft of Moorgate, I’m face to neck-nape with hunched heads over mobile devices, half-shuffling, nonetheless at some speed.
Coffee #3
Crossing the empty space of London Wall, I’m at coffee number three, the least remarkable, but most needed: this is my last chance to transform myself before I hit the office. At the Costa next to the tube, a series of hand signals between me and the small, circular-spectacled Indian girl at the coffee machine begin before I enter the shop, and have become a moment of intimate, daily, ritual. She produces a double espresso with exactly the right ratio of water to coffee.
After a series of gyms, after-work bars, and at least eight branches of Pret a Manger, the City yields to Hoxton, and the scowling commuter pedestrians yield to aggressive cyclists with cameras on their heads, no doubt to capture their sense of triumph when they get to scream at a pedestrian. They, for sure, do not yield.
After crossing a truly terrifying contraflow, and stuffing a banana in my face from a Sainsbury’s local (a saving of 35 pence on purchasing one at Costa), I am approaching the office, along a street of tattoo parlours, a bespoke hat shop, 3 chicken shops and a pizzeria, a vegan cycling workshop cafe which specialises in humiliating its customers for their lack of detailed knowledge about derailleurs, and more scaffolding.
At the office, the glass door always looks somehow sharp, fragile but dangerous. It offers a highly unwelcome chance to see my skull-like face, all hollow sockets, eye bags, and greenish flesh. I take a deep breath, type in the code, and walk through.
In that moment I am thinking how I hate every single moment, making plans for how I will one day escape. As I walk up the stairs, over the grey carpets, I am begging not to meet anyone, but at least one Millennial will pass me with a bowl and spoon in hand, and greet me with a spray of muesli. I say a sunny hello, wiping my face.
Coffees past
When I last changed job, I had to leave my coffee guy of 5 years. It was at New Cross, one of the classic interstial stations, with a vast vista across South East London, past the megabeast rubbish burning tower, over one of the largest snarls of rail signalling, and the jumping off point of the Ginger Line.
The tiny coffee hut there was run by a friendly middle aged Algerian man, whose name I never learned, and a younger, Moroccan man from Fez, whom I originally befriended to stop him short changing me every single day. I didn’t know his name either, but in my head, I called him Fez. We talked about weather, which led to global warming, holiday destinations, and why I should definitely go to Fez. When I went on holiday, he would ask where I had been with some concern (still not Fez). When I was especially unhappy, I would stop off there for a coffee on the way home too, for a knowing smile, more weather, and just to feel more human. I felt genuinely guilty when I changed my route to work for a new job, and still wonder how he and the owner are doing. I remember his prayer mat, his tiny heater which ‘did nothing’ In the winter, and the even tinier fan, which ‘made it worse’ in the summer.
Without my small rituals I couldn’t do life. I need small things that are mine, the same, reliable, good. I like the different people. I like the fact that over the course of years of mornings, you learn about people, build relationships built on hand-signals, knowledge of coffee type, simple transactions, which are nonetheless relationships of preference, and very brief moments of human intimacy.
I realised recently that I don’t really like the taste of espresso. So I suppose that must not be the point.