Writing this morning’s entry in a Fortitude Valley café, jamming the writing and publishing work in before I hie off to start the new Brisbane Writer’s Festival job. There’s a series of mirror balls hanging over my head, a terrible cup of coffee to my right, and the kind of soft, lilting indie-pop that’s custom-designed for cafes hanging overhead.
All in all, not my permanent writing spot for the duration of this contract, which is a shame because it’s rather perfectly place (and, I suspect, the nearest source of caffeine to the office).
I miss food courts today. The myth of the writer is largely café-focused—a stereotype I suspect we inherited from the writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald who decamped to the Left Bank of Paris after the war and wrote of the café culture there. Personally, they’re always my second choice if I’ve got to work in public.
Food courts offer large, anonymous spreads of seating where you can pretty much set up and disappear into the crowd, occupying a table that is shared by so many possible food vendors that nobody is paying much attention to what you’re doing or how long you’ve lingered there. I spent some of the most productive writing years of my life in food courts, especially in the hour or two before work. Café’s offer a personal experience and ambiance, but food courts are all about shuffling massive numbers of anonymous shoppers through as quickly as possible. When you want to be left alone to bang out a few words, that’s anonymity is invaluable.
There is a food court on the way to work, but it’s attached to a transit hub and, obviously, I’m trying to keep my exposure down given the pandemic.
And so the search for a new routine begins, trying to find a café amenable to delivering good coffee and letting me batter away at a keyboard in the corner for an hour and a half. I suspect there’s an option that’ll work around here somewhere, but it’s definitely not this place…