A coffee, chatter and natter is my idea of absolute hell
Iscour the world these days (via the comfort of my own laptop, of course – the days when I made an actual physical effort to pursue something passed long ago) looking for grace notes. This week the news that Costa Coffee is to become the first café chain to embrace the Chatter and Natter table scheme has caught my eye.
For the uninitiated, the scheme sets aside tables specifically for those who wish to (and you may be ahead of me here) chatter and natter with strangers who also wish to chatter and natter. It is intended to help diffuse loneliness, a growing epidemic in our ever more atomised society, but it is that rare thing; an initiative with good intentions whose unplanned ramifications yield only more glorious results.
Because not only the lonely will gravitate towards these havens of sociability but also the simply sociable. The naturally gregarious. The people for whom talking seems as natural as breathing. Or, as the rest of us call them, the unbearable. Imagine the lightness of being that will be occasioned for all by an all-but-official café policy of gentle bifurcation. You, you outward-looking ever-yakking sociopaths, sit over there and turn all the strangers you find there into friends. We, who prefer to duck and cover even if an actual friend walks in without warning as we are recaffeinating, will sit over here. I can honestly feel my shoulders – and soul – relaxing as I think of entering such a safe harbour.
O brave new world that has such delicate refinement in it. You wonder what other benefits this unsought progress might herald. Parties with an official firm-handshake-nokissing rule nailed helpfully, and appropriately Lutheranly, to the door before you go in? Corridors whose walls are marked with increments labelled with the reaction to be displayed towards anyone heading towards you from the other end? My hopes, they stir. They rise. Visions of a world free of both uncertainty and unnecessary chat shimmer and dance before my shining eyes.
Madonna turns 60! Am I the only woman of my generation to whom this
– to whom Madonna herself
– means nothing? This is not a desperate attempt to swim against the tide of (genuinely) adoring and heartfelt pieces celebrating her birthday and adumbrating the effects she has had on individual lives and on culture as a whole. This is simple fact, stemming from an upbringing by a mother whose drive and ambition were – and remain – far in excess of Madonna’s own and directed to entirely opposite ends. Had my mother released a dance-pop single in 1988, it would have been titled Don’t Express Yourself. My sister and I grew up in a corner of Catford, south-east London that our fond parent singlehandedly turned into something between an Amish homestead and North Korea. We weren’t, for example, allowed to have a drink with soup. Soup’s a drink and a meal. Claims of thirst were denied. I don’t mean the slaking of said thirst was denied. The claim was. “No,” she would say in tones that brooked no riposte. “You’re not.” We had a TV but we were never allowed to turn it on without permission. And we weren’t allowed to watch Top of the Pops or listen to pop music. Why? We didn’t ask why. Because, that’s why.
I saw one glimpse of the Material Girl video on holiday in Cornwall and it is embedded in my memory forever. She was so beautiful, confident and altogether extraordinary. It should have inspired me, shot me through with fire and determination to be all that I could be and set me on a road to self-discovery. And in a way, I suppose, it did. I leapt towards the screen, terrified, and turned it off, the better to cleave to my known path. Truly, one way or another, she has shaped us all.
I’m on holiday in Norfolk at the moment, and was standing on the beach with a friend looking out to sea at the majestic crop of wind turbines on the horizon. He made a noise of disgust and delivered a small rant about giving in to ecowarriors. I was reminded why I only see him once every very many holidays.
Because of all the things I don’t understand about enviro-sceptics (and I am not unsympathetic, believing as I do that as with everything else under this – increasingly carcinogenic – sun, there is always at least un peu d’exaggeration on every side) it is the objection to getting stuff for free. Which is, essentially, what renewable energy is. The sea’s there. The sun’s there. The wind’s there. You build some stuff to capture it and – it’s yours. Forever. It just keeps coming. You don’t have to keep digging it out of the ground, ferrying it about, or finding somewhere to keep your radioactive isotopes. How can you object to this? It’s so clever, so neat, so satisfying. And if you hate nature, you can easily think of it as getting one over on the bugger. Am I missing a step? Or are they? Cultural rows are always illuminating. So too is the current abuso-debate raging online, and occasionally spilling over into what Luddites still persist in calling the real world, about whether Idris Elba could or should be the next James Bond. Obviously it’s sorted out the racists from the non-racists, but this can as easily be accomplished by giving your extended family one too many sherries over Christmas. Perhaps more edifying has been the gender split. By and large, men (the name’s men, white men) have been vociferously against Idris Bond, basically because it makes it slightly harder to imagine themselves as the superspy with all the gadgets. Women, meanwhile, have been all for the new development because what we really want is someone who looks like he wouldn’t need any gadgets for the thing Bond is famous for when he is off superspying duty. By which measure, Idris Elba is frankly overqualified. I suggest men put their imaginations to work a bit harder all round.