Back in Town

           I have lately been waxing lyrical about the west coast of Wales, where we recently enjoyed hiking and biking during a spell of summery weather, and the west coast of Scotland, a more remote region, where the weather was ‘variable’. (On one occasion the wind was so fierce that I got up at 03.00 to secure outdoor furniture that threatened to cause serious damage to the campervan. Only then was I able to sleep.) But weather is all part of the exhilarating experience of outdoor life beyond the city and, so long as you are properly equipped for its vagaries, no hindrance to full immersion in what the great outdoors has to offer –  rejuvenation of mind and body and, these days, refuge from the covid virus.

          However, what both coasts have in common – apart from an abundance of natural attractions – is a dearth of coffee shops. Of course, no entrepreneur worth their salt would sink capital into an enterprise in a place where footfall is insufficient to cover costs, let alone earn a profit, but there are outlets – cafés and such – where coffee, of a sort, can be had. Many of them sport serious-looking, fancy Italian equipment, which promises satisfaction their operatives are unable to deliver, because they lack either the expertise or the best beans – or both. So, one adapts by setting one’s expectations low. On one occasion, I resorted to a Costa takeaway from a Spar shop, reasoning that the well-known national brand would at least guarantee consistency of quality. It didn’t. Perhaps the shopkeeper used lower quality beans than the ones stipulated in the franchise.

          You might think that I bang on about coffee too much but, like any beverage, there is a quality curve and, if you develop a taste for it, you will seek out the best – budget permitting. More importantly coffee, like tea and alcohol, is not merely a drink – it has a social function, the legendary suburban ‘coffee morning’ being but one example. In fact, whole empires have been built upon get-togethers over coffee: consider the famed coffee shops of 17^th century London, where merchants, bankers, shippers and insurers met informally and built trading alliances that resulted in the biggest concentration of wealth the world had ever seen. More recently, this same phenomenon occurred in California’s Silicon Valley, where tech geeks met financiers and creatives, resulting in the spawning of the monster digital companies that now dominate our lives. Unfortunately, the success of these companies is such that their well-paid employees have ruined the local property markets, forcing prices up and tenants out, some of those tenants being the very coffee shops where they used to meet to swap ideas and make those serendipitous connections that can so change the course of world events. I hear that one such establishment, Red Rock Coffee, where the founders of WhatsApp used to hang out before they sold to Facebook for $19bn, tried to stay afloat by crowdfunding a mere $300,000 but failed to reach the target.

          Still, who needs coffee shops when you’ve got Zoom? Well, would Zoom have been stillborn but for the existence of Red Rock and the like? The same argument applies to cities in general: that they are hubs within which valuable connections are made between closely mingling populations of creative people, the result being economic and cultural outputs that sustain society. The persistence of the covid pandemic has seen something of a flight from cities, unfortunately, with commuters preferring to work from home and residents looking to sell up and move to the country, but I am not tempted to follow suit, myself. I put my hope in an urban recovery of sorts. It feels good to be back in town, in my favourite coffee shop, with a flat white made by a seriously bearded barista.