customers

I get home to a home bathed in light and sunshine. It was damn hot in the servery today and many degrees higher in the kitchen, what with all the ovens and toast machines and grills pumping hot breath into the skinny place. When folk come to the counter, I notice that all they want is recognition. No, not all they want, obviously, because they are here to order two kiddies meals, one toastie with beet, feta and walnut, one just cheese and maybe seaweed chutney, two soups, one with a cheese scone, yes, warmed please, another with something else. I find the ordering a wonderful stray into a new jigsaw piece, mainly because I have not paid due attention to what is on offer that day, this day. One customer confounded me. He wasn’t initially friendly, just ordered but, I noticed as we attempted to work together, him on the far side and me, glasses steamed up and suddenly just out of the Washeroo because everyone else had just gone somewhere, that he wasn’t that certain of himself. I believe that, on the far side there is one part of the puzzle of this whole running a cafe thing, one that can be drawn into place. Together with smiles and explanations, he ordered. I noticed that, after sometime, he and his wife remained seated, talking amicably. I set the jigsaw piece in place.

When I set off for work in the morning, I have no set picture, because I know a lot about business, over decades, and there is only tangle. There is also the Jester, the one which dances in just to confound. You think, we thinked, that, because of the weather, the time of year, the day itself, we would expect this. Well, ‘this’ never turned up. Never. Running a business may be a dream, as it was for us, but it is tough and unpredictable, diminishing and very personal and it takes many years to establish. I think, I remember, the fallouts, the doubts, and the Jester temptation to stop the whole thing. I remember the cold winter giving up. I remember the massousive effort it took to rise up and run again, skinny, empty of conviction, flayed with self-unbelief, over and over until the business recognised us and the Jester was just a snigger in the effluence. I remember.

It should be quieter now, so they say, but I am watching the weather and the fact that this island is rated as the best weekend retreat in Scotland. I can see evidence of this. Not a single parking space in the main town, not even in the flux car park by the harbour, and it is nearly September, so the whole ‘kids going back to school’ is no longer true. The weather is shifting, the planet shifting and time has moved verily on in terms of the predicts of the old jigsaw. However, there is opportunity in this if acceptance and understanding and facilitation are ready, like the three musketeers, ready to face up to what now is and thus to adjust stirrups, or maybe change horses. Whichever way anyone looks it, if they do at all, the jigsaw is no longer predictable. The tangle has come in, and the jester too. Even as old as I am am, I can see it and I don’t want to be blind to any of it, even if it takes me some time to research and to understand.

To be honest, I am sad for some of my peers. Like me, they are olding, but some of them are glue-fixed to how it was and, thus startled,, at the least, when a dynamic we have all trusted, or learned to trust from parents, is jestered away, like mist. The jigsaw is what we trusted and it worked for decades. No longer. I like the ‘longer’ word. It proffers hope and continuance and i will take it. Does it, I wonder, remove the word predict from our language as so many other words have fallen away due to lack of use? I don’t know, and the ‘don’t know’ of these times enlivens me. Learning, as I have for some years, to live alone, to work my own jester problems out, even in the dark months, strongs me. I won’t say it is my choice because it isn’t, but the what is of ‘is’ is where I am and I love life with a passion. Tangle? Jester? I still love the jigsaw, the pleasant picture, the endless blue of a seascape wherein the nightmare of a clock of deep sea creatures confounds me with the seaswirl of itself

There is always tangle. Always a jester.

Someone said the Q word this morning. It isn’t allowed, and we all flinched as it spilled through lips and took off like a jester cloud, filling the whole place. It was gentle for a while, coffees, hot chocolates/what type/marshmallows/cream, bespoke teas, cakes, scones with jam and cream, blueberry bakewell, still warm, chocolate cake so full of chocolate as to dynamic the most miserable of souls into hopefulness. Peanut butter brownies, gluten free flapjacks, and so much more. WE are so much more, the team who work here and that’s a good thing because of the Q word earlier.

Around midday they came, and kept coming. The Washeroo was swamped with plates and cups, water glasses and pots and pans and all things kitchen. I don’t even know what half of this equipment is for but it does produce excellent lunches so I don’t really need to do more than to make sure all of it is thoroughly scrubbed. We welcomed dogs, children, families, couples and we never stopped at all, clearing, chatting, welcoming, delivering great food. I ducked out at times, just to escape the high piles of plates and cups and cutlery and pots and the endless parts of a new mixer. I changed the water many times in the deep sinks, so scurrilous did it become. I remember pulling back at one point and looking at the greasy brown swirl of it and thinking this. I don’t want anyone to think that I would ever countenance such water in my sink, not staying there like it was an ok staying there thing. I pulled the plug often.

The thing about running a very popular cafe is that the populous will come. They come because they hear it is a lovely welcoming space and that the food is healthy and fresh and prepared daily. Of course they do. And reputation will grow because people will recommend and new visitors will come because of that. I know that the owners of this cafe have got it so right. I also know that a business takes years to learn its wingspan. I remember growing a few and the early years were also cloudal. I remember doubt and judgment and loss of confidence. However, I am glad we kept going because now all around the world the work we did is used in protocols around sea-mammal research. There were clouds aplenty in the long years of that keeping on thing.

Home now and the sky is a big nudge of clouds. Not a flat sky, not lying down, not at all, but there are stratonimbus and a dwindle of cumulous and a load of feathering interruptions going on in the conversation. I hear it loudal. It moves all the time, shifts, blends, pulls back as if in outrage. Below, I have a baked potato and salad for supper.

The Q word? ‘I think it might be Quiet today”

Enough said on that.