Cafe L❤️ve

Not About the Coffee

Cafés are busy little places. And no more so than for the waiting staff.

Always a table to clear. ☑️

A floor to mop. ☑️

A coffee machine to empty. ☑️

Cups to clean. ☑️

Customers to engage with. ☑️

And on and on… 

That’s a lot of demands for a human, so imagine my surprise when I noticed a waitress braving the no-man’s land woodchip play area.

Moments before I’d been lost in the frenetic ping-pong madness that comes with chasing a 16mnth old toddler around a playpark. My daughter is technically a crawler, not a toddler, but boy can she get about on her shins!

So, I was being bounced around from one potentially dangerous play area to another, and then….Lo! What’s this…a friendly face!

Waitress: “Would you like some coffee?”

Me in disbelief; “Who me!?”

Fresh out of noting the ratio of woodchip which still had bark, versus the woodchip which was bark-less, I was suddenly brought up to the dizzying heights of adult eye-level conversation.

“Wow, thanks!” I managed to say before she casually walked away. “Just doing my job Sir”, my completely imagined reply. I wondered if she knew about the mycelium highway right under her feet.

A parent adrift in the Play-Grade-Woodchip-Sea was offered a life-raft. A life-raft in the form of a delicious slurp of that brown liquid gold; Coffee, the patron Saint of Parents since 1998 (The year the first UK Starbucks opened).

It wasn’t really about the coffee though was it?

I went back to the bark.