| I had a really interesting day a few weeks ago, which I meant to record sooner. Unfortunately, like a lot of things in my life that I’ve meant to do, I’ve actually done the just opposite; in this case I have forgotten a bit about the day in question. So if you finish reading this and think to yourself “Well, it was an interesting day, but not so interesting as to induce compulsive recording of its events” then it’s possibly because the really juicy, meaty, tender, medium-rare parts of the day have been lost in the sands of time/lost in my embarrassingly alcohol annihilated memory, like so many names of people I’ve met in the last few years. One bit I wasn’t too sure about was what had happened in the morning, before I got to work. At first I thought it might have been that day where I didn’t have enough money to pay the taxi driver, and he half jokingly threatened to kill me. But I think the only event that could have got me thinking “Today is an interesting day” is something that I remember all too well, involving coffee (although for a change not Gloria Jeans. I’m not saying it’s a change for the better). I had walked down to the best (read: only) coffee shop near where I work, to get a strong dose of the only legal drug that can get me through 8 hours of work on a Saturday. I stepped through the door of what I thought was the coffee shop, but apparently I had walked into a kebab place. Slightly confused, since this was a pretty big mistake to make, and since I didn’t remember any kebab places nearby, I wandered back onto the street to see if I could get an idea of how I’d walked into a mystery kebab shop when the other 900 times I’d come to get coffee I had managed to identify the correct location. But here’s the thing: it WAS the correct location. In the space of a week, the coffee shop had COMPLETELY CHANGED into a kebab place, even featuring those big rotating devices that function both as an attractive display for the rotting carcasses of the animal they use to make kebabs, and also as controlled bacteria breeding grounds. This perhaps doesn’t come off as too weird when you read it, but I must stress, it was as though THE CAFÉ AS I KNEW IT HAD NEVER BEEN, and let me tell you that café was in fine working order the last Sunday. Also it was 8:50 AM on a Saturday morning, and I hadn’t yet had any coffee. An additional point worth noting is that the café was (and I think, is) called “The Red Centre Café”, which after its little Orwell-esque rewriting of history, only brings to mind the sort of dictatorial regimes that you wouldn’t want to buy your coffee from (luckily, the lines aren’t as long as you’d expect). Part II coming soon |