Coffee Shop Journal

Flying home from Boston yesterday I was reading Love Over Scotland by Alexander McCall Smith. Having just typed that, the book sounds so “paperback romance”! It’s not…Alexander McCall Smith has written lots of great contemporary Scotland-based fiction. My favorite is Espresso Tales.  Anyway, I came across this little passage that sums up my passion for community and the possibilities of connecting in third places like coffee shops.

Matthew was crossing Dundas Street to that side of the road where Big Lou kept her coffee bar, at basement level, in the transformed premises of an old book shop. The Morning After Coffee Bar was different from the mass-produced coffee bars that had mushroomed on every street almost everywhere, a development which presaged the flattening effects of globalization; the spreading, under a cheerful banner, of a sameness that threatened to weaken and destroy all sense of place. And while it would be possible, by walking into Stockbridge to get the authentic globalized experience, none of Big Lou’s customers would have dreamed of being that oxymoronic. One feature of the chain coffee shops was the absence of conversation between staff and customer, and indeed between customer and customer. Nobody spoke in such places; the staff said nothing because they had nothing to say; the customers because they felt inhibited from talking in such standardised surroundings. There was something about plastic surroundings that subdued the spirits, that cudgelled one into silence.

Big Lou, of course, would speak to anybody who came into her coffee bar; indeed, she thought it would be rude not to do so. Conversation was a recognition of the other, the equivalent of the friendly greetings that people would give one another in the street, back in Arbroath. And people generally responded well to Big Lou’s remarks, unburdening themselves of the sort of things that people unburden themselves of in the hairdresser’s salon or indeed the dentist’s chair in those precious few moments before the dentist’s probing fingers make two-sided conversation impossible.

I found the perspective offered from this Scottish writer to be very interesting. I don’t know that I agree with all his assessments of the impossibility of feeling at home in a “chain coffee shop”, but his words are cautionary tales for us to make sure that we continue to be human and warm in our interactions no matter where we find ourselves sitting with our coffee cups and computers!