As much as I am anti-Americanisation of British culture and their butchery of our mother tongue (see ‘movies’ as exhibit no1 m’lud), I have succumbed to the lure of a high street coffee shop.
For years I sat on the other side of the coffee table and mocked people, just like you, as you wasted a fiver a day to sit in an ‘Ikeaeque’ showroom style lounge as you sup on a latte and imagine you are Pheobe off Friends…
But I have succumbed thanks, solely, to the Sainsburys meal deal.
My workday routine now consists of a trip to the local JS petrol station where a processed pasta ‘dish’, along with the world’s smallest Grenade bar are washed down, included in the meal deal price, with a warming paper cup of Costa’s finest.
I’m so invested I even have the app and can often be found lurking around after I have sugared up to nab others QR codes with the aim of reaching the hallowed 10 in which to elicit a free drink.
And then it gets real.
The confines of the petrol station are one thing: safe, if not very personable, but clinical, you buy your goods, jump in the jalopy, and off you go, but the sit-down walk-in coffee shop where you are served by real life humans is another ball game entirely.
Firstly, the queues: as you wonder what the attraction is as they are paying a princely sum for theirs and mine is ‘free’ as your battle a dizzying array of concoctions, half of which aren’t even coffee anyhow.
There are different versions and sizes (where medium often means large and small is medium) as you choose from oat, soya, yak and breast milk, and syrups, which taste nothing like syrup - you feel like you’ve just finished the general knowledge round on Mastermind having answered 25 quickfire questions which have rendered you unsure as to what you actually ordered.
They ask your name in some and have never got mine right.
Brett has become Dick, although I’m sure that was a dig, or Bert, or Bryn as you try to stir your expensive liquid with a long matchstick, struggle to get the lid on and then queue up again to beg for napkins which they don’t keep out as, and I quote, they ‘get stolen’.
The coffee makers class themselves as artistes by naming themselves ‘baristas’, which sticks in the craw.
I encountered a similar level of silliness on a Subway sandwich advert many years ago where they were described as ‘construction technicians’.
Now I’m not belittling the job, and I have undertaken many similar employs, but you are making hot beverages, not producing art, so wind your neck in, and get a hurry please as the flicks, spins and posing syrup shot squirts do little but enrage those of us who are old enough to see through such folly!
