Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: coffee

nett cost

Walking down the street in the wake of three blokes as confident as three galleons. Their coats blow open. It’s a fresh sunny day. Something small flies off to the side & I follow it into the flowerbed: one of those tiny, slender plastic stirrers that have, to my mind, no excuse for existing in the first place when the good Lord has given us reusable Spoons. I pick it up. Talking to myself (“C’mon, c’mon, so they get angry, you’ll live”) I catch them up and speak to the centre galleon, whose billowing trail of steam indicates he has bought a coffee. “Entschulding. Ist das deine?” Excuse me, is this yours? He looks pained. “Ich werfe es in die Müll,” I tell him: I’ll drop it in the garbage. “Weil es so viel…” searching for the word and bailing out, “so viel netter ist.” Because that’s so much… nicer.

He sort of smiles. “Das ist ja sehr nett von Ihnen.” That is very… nice of you. “Danke,” he says. I say, “Danke,” and the small storm of distress in my heart lifts and blows away. Confirmed once again in the ancient prejudice that people are sweet and kind, we just get confused, we just need to keep reaching one another.

November 23, 2013
cafe calm

It was breathlessly hot. Almost every inch of Berlin seems to be paved. I went out with a friend who has a dog. The cafe we found has three guardian trees, sentinels of sensibility on a long glaring featureless street. The dog flung himself onto the shaded pavement. The cafe owner brought him a basin of water. He brought us menus written on little lined notebooks, with pictures of writers pasted inside. They made perfect coffee and perfect eggs. The owner, a motherly, middle-aged gay man in a blue gingham shirt, came over and said, holding up two biscuits between his thumb and forefinger, “And is my little friend allowed to have something to eat?” He crouched by the dog and stroked his head, offering the crunchy treats coaxingly. The awning over our heads was caramel-coloured and had strings of golden lights looped underneath. The tables had little sprouting pots of flowers on them and those glass sugar dispensers with a tilted steel nipple like round fat ducklings. We gazed up and down the street, falling into silence, stunned by this unusual heat. I told my companion, cafes save my life every week. What would this street be without this oasis? A bleak, suburban hopelessness. Cafes give the feeling that human civilization has been for something. They collect up the beauties of what we have made. This lantern, this music, this length of printed cloth, this sturdy tumbler just right for the grasp. From a cafe vantage point one can sit and look out. One gazes on the world passing ceaselessly, in starts and spurts, and says, Aye. So it is. Such is life. This is us. Here we are. It’s a funny old world. And so it goes.

July 29, 2013
for quitters

I’ve a German-speaking friend who since quitting tobacco suffers terribly from grievings. ‘Grievings’ are what happens when you depend on a drug and then give it up: heroin grievings, nicotine grievings. I quit coffee in January, and today in the Lebanese shop where the machine sent out aromatic blasts and the steam collected on the rainy window like tears, I experienced coffee grievings. Coffee, you sweet sorrow, you sultry wench.

June 7, 2013
street friendships

I just fell into one of those instant street-friendships that sometimes lead somewhere and very often don’t. It is so lonely & exacting trying to make a life in a completely new city, I seem to have been doing it over and over the last ten years as I wonder: where is it that the tribe of people ~ who are poets, and deeply sensitive & reflective, and are peace-loving activists, and like to laugh and dance a lot, and care about the world and all who sail in her ~ find their home?

So this was not a moment too soon. I’d come out of the Underground and was tramping through the snow which has mounted so rapidly all day today. A woman beside me suddenly spoke. “What? Is this Christmas?” She indicated the white sky, the buried trees, the white-piling pavements. “Yes,” I said, “and I was just noticing, I have never seen these kind of tiny snowballs before – they’re not really flakes – they are like drops of water.” “Stimmt,” she said, musingly, gazing at the tiny white balls crunching underfoot. She is a yoga teacher and teaches art therapy. We reached the snowy markets and parted. There were all kinds of activities this weekend, she said, to celebrate Spring – such as it is – and would I like to have coffee in this gallery cafe her mate runs and go for a wander. Well, as it happens yes, I very much rather would. Thank you, snowboat universe.

March 19, 2013
his three favourite things

Hired a bike and visited my only friend in Denmark, who runs a beautiful second-hand store that sells his three favourite things: books, and records, and coffee. He has two splendid crimson armchairs and windows onto a cobbled street. How we met was, I was in Berlin over the summer and dropped in on the bookstore that had agreed to trial one of my books in their English-language section. The pile was sitting untouched but I saw this tall man hovering and said to him, unexpectedly, “You should buy this one! I wrote it.” So he did and we have been friends ever since. God love good bookshops, the friendship agency of the civilized world. Today he had on Nick Cave’s new album and was listening to it “over and over.” I said, “He’s Australian! Like, the coolest Australian since… 1975.” In the riverside cafe where I ate dinner afterwards they were playing Olivia Newton-John, who has no use for cool and was singing “Hopelessly Devoted to You” as though her heart would crumble. What a song. I and the elderly waiter were both singing it. Two tough-minded Danish women in their fifties walked in to order beers, wearing what seemed to me very insufficient clothing. Outside, the water darkly rippled and a skin of ice extended itself infinitesimally.

March 1, 2013