THE PROFESSIONALS IN THE CAFÉ

Another day, another café. Today I’m alone in the work restaurant, overlooking the lake and the beehives.

I say alone, but it’s packed. Executives with open laptops sip lattes gingerly, and check their phones. Young marketing types with pretty hair and serious looks, chatter over plates of salad and angled Microsoft Surfaces. One points at the screen with a pen and the other nods, looking over her trendy thick-rimmed glasses.

The café itself is still quite new. It’s been built to resemble a Starbucks I think, complete with fancy lamps hanging from timber beams, and large glass windows from floor to ceiling. There are sofas and bookcases and plastic plants and eccentric chairs of course, along with wood-effect tables that are all different, yet weirdly the same. I’m sat at one, feeling the sunshine beam through the glass.

A lady walked over, and for the briefest moment she looked straight at me. I wondered whether she was about to say something or even sit opposite me, but in the half-second it took for me to clock her expression, she’d moved and sat with her friend.

That expression, by the way was, ‘I think that man’s got food in his beard.’

I was hoping to close my eyes and just listen to the world but it’s all papers and sales figures. Who cares about that stuff? Well I mean these people do, or they wouldn’t have taken those sales figures out to lunch with them. But these people only care because they’ve been told to.

That is the system. Care about these numbers like we do or we’ll find someone else with a passion for them (or at least a better skill at pretending to have a passion for them) while you’re honing your acting in the queue at the job centre.

It is funny sometimes to think of what people think is important. Me too - my world is far too small, sitting on the edge of a sunlit Starbucks, on my own, people-watching in the corner. Then, what do I know?

The sun beams in, warm through the glass. A wind ripples the blue lake and the shivering trees that surround it. Birds tumble and dive through the air and the swans glide past in their silent elegant way. Inside, the professionals are poring over their laptops. I smile and head outside for a bit.