CONFESSIONS OF A TABLE RENTER

Olly Mann regularly opts to work in his local coffee shop – complying with a host of unspoken rules

If you’ve spent any time with your laptop hogging a coffee shop couch, you know that free Wi-Fi comes with certain social benefits – and a host of unspoken rules.

THERE’S AN ART TO WORKING IN A COFFEE SHOP. I don’t mean making the coffee itself – though I understand baristas can attend advanced courses and win awards for pouring frothed milk into hot water at weird angles. I mean: when you’re a customer, sitting there with your laptop, checking your email and totting up your spreadsheets, while ordering just enough coffee to keep the manager happy but not drinking so much that your teeth rattle – there’s an art to that.

My late father could never comprehend this. “Why,” he would exclaim, “when you have a perfectly serviceable home office, would you choose to hunch over your laptop in a coffee shop?”

But Dad didn’t understand coffee shops generally, being of the generation that either went out for lunch at a restaurant, or went for a drink at the pub. Sitting around yapping while sipping hot liquid was, to his mind, an activity exclusively reserved for wrinklies at National Trust tea rooms.

I tried to explain numerous times – almost as many times as he asked me

why we were required to stand to order our drinks, rather than have a waiter come and serve us, despite the fact that our coffee was costing almost a fiver – that the point of me setting up a remote franchise of my business empire in a corner of our local coffee shop was that this helped me feel part of the community. Tapping away as people live and breathe around me makes me feel as though I’m creating something purposeful and relevant, rather than

just cranking out ever more digital ones and zeros to bounce around a distant cloud.

But, really, that’s only partly true. I hang out in coffee shops because a) I was a teenager in the 1990s and Friends has influenced my lifestyle expectations on some deeply profound level; b) I’m hopelessly addicted to caffeine and, even when I experiment making espresso at home with that posh machine that looks like a Cadillac, I still can’t create a cup that’s quite pleasurable enough; and c) if I solely worked from home I’d never get out of my pyjamas, would check Facebook every ten seconds, and would fester in a world of daytime television and endless packets of biscuits.

Basically, I don’t trust myself to remain at home for protracted periods of time and successfully avoid distraction for long enough to actually get any work done. This is why I’ve never written a novel. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

But still, the community argument remains. I don’t actually speak to anyone in the coffee shop, obviously, be- cause I live in South East England and all my fellow patrons are equally absorbed in their own laptop, smartphone or – if they’re feeling particularly needy – drinking companion.

Although we’ve all chosen to come to a public place that’s explicitly designed to facilitate friendly conversation around warm beverages, there’s an unspoken mutual understanding that we’d all much rather sit alone in silence, trying to ignore the bland corporate jazz music, and chat on social networks to people we once knew who are now on the other side of the world. But, you know, occasionally I’ll flirt with the girl who sells the chocolate pralines, or do a supp re ss e d smile at someone queuing for the loo, so: community.

AND, LIKE I SAY, THERE’S AN ART TO IT. For instance, the serious coffee shop freelancer doesn’t ever eat the cake. The cake is expensive, sugary, calorific, slump- inducing and moreish. Indulge in just one bite, and before you know it you might find yourself committed to daily cake, or even twice-daily cake; it’s not unheard

It’s only once you’ve spent, say, 20 hours working in a coffee shop that you can acquire my Jedi-level skills

of to suddenly begin a ten-pound-aday cake habit. The cake is there for the mums, the pensioners, the book clubs; the fleeting passengers who stop by maybe once or twice a week and make a big song and dance about ordering some cake because they’re feeling a bit ‘naughty’ and they’ll have just a slither as a ‘treat’ to themselves. These people, these cake people, are not serious coffee- shop people. They’re cake tourists.

It’s only once you’ve spent, say, 20 hours working in a coffee shop that you can acquire my Jedi-level skills. I can effortlessly maintain a blob of useless creamy froth at the bottom of my mug, so it permanently looks like I haven’t finished. Thereby, my mug remains uncollected, and I can continue to hog the sofa without paying further ‘table rent’. I can quickly identify when a fellow customer is about to leave without their newspaper, and swoop in on it immediately, so I never have to buy one. I can sit right next to the ice blender in summer, as it crunches out its endless fruity fluid, and I don’t even hear it.

I would regale you with yet more tales of my genius, but I’ve just noticed there’s only one bagel left, so I’d better go ahead and order it or else I’ll be stuck eating bircher muesli for lunch.

That loyalty card isn’t going to complete itself!