An introvert's guide to sitting in a cafe
This isn't a food blog. But cafes aren't really about food, are they?
On a Sunday morning in sunny Pyrmont - dispositionally sunny, if not always meteorologically so - my heart calls for coffee and my soul calls for food I haven't made myself. It's not an unfamiliar call.
Two cocktails and a bottle of Italian beer from the night before were tap tapping at the inside of my skull the way they do now that I'm in my late late thirties. They ask this question, persistently, it goes something like, "Is this how you thought your life would turn out?"
It's not important, and it's easy enough to ignore on the other side of a bucket of coffee.
There's a neighbourhood cafe I go to sometimes. I've been there with family, sitting in the sun outside. I've been there at lunchtime, squeezed in and sat next to a stranger because the place gets overrun by post-meet dragon boaters, all smiley amongst friends and endorphins.
And on a Sunday morning in sunny Pyrmont I visit this cafe once again, earlier than I'm wont to and I sit at a corner table, wedged in on a cushioned bar seat that stretches the length of the room all the way to the lady I see each time I go there, herself sat at her own table, complete with the cough and the book of crosswords she always has. Maybe it's me in fifty years, and that's why she smiles back at me.
The restaurateur receives feedback from a customer and passes it on afterwards to his cook. It's something about the freshness of the food, but "What can you do?" he commiserates. "It's all made fresh, and there are so many ingredients. Maybe be a little bit quicker?"
I like to watch how he treats his staff. He tells his 26-year-old waitress who has a forty-year-old boyfriend that he's only two years away from being that age himself. He says it will go so quickly, in the blink of an eye.
"It depends," he says. "If I forget to live, it will go by so fast. If I remember to live, then it will slow down and stretch out."
They get my coffee order wrong. I ask for almond milk and honey, but instead they bring me something different with a sugar on the side. It's bucket-sized and caffeinated and I don't care enough to let them know, plus it tastes like I want to keep drinking it, to seamlessly suck it in, three big sips at a time.
I need the salt, so I get fries with my breakfast burger. They do fancy, but I haven't ordered fancy. I've ordered revival. They greet some customers by name. Others bring their well-behaved dogs in to wait for takeaway coffee. Still more bring their whole families in to brunch and share company.
There are solo diners, like me, and I muse on how we're anonymous but not invisible. We're fed, and we're sated, and we don't have to cook. We sit with our phones or our crosswords and people watch exactly what it is we think we're missing out on and realise we're not missing out at all.
There's freedom in a Sunday solo brunch, and sitting in a corner, watching a cafe like it's a cinema. I'm sad to leave because the story line keeps changing, but large groups of people start to file in now that lunch is approaching. And I want another coffee, just the same, but I don't know what to ask for.