The Outside Of Everything

Chapter 9
The Cafe

The more they disappear the more cafes get written about. With the homogenisation of our high streets I suppose that’s understandable. But the process has been going on now for quite some time. Things change, but not always for the best.

Lest we get too dewy eyed and sentimental though, it is worth remembering just how grim some greasy spoons could be. They weren’t called that without good reason. Greasy spoons? Well, maybe a communal sugar bowl, with a coagulated spoon, granules growing by the hour, tied to the counter with string long past its best. Sugar mixed with ash.

Nevertheless there was a certain romantic lure long attached to the working man’s caff. Leo the Gardener used to tell us about the cafes the communists collected in around the East End in the ‘30s. Lots of earnest conversations and furtive looks at appropriately revolutionary minded girls. And more recently we’d grown up on stories of Dexys Midnight Runners and the team that meets in caffs. Not to mention the Left Bank intellectuals and the existentialists hanging out with Juliette Greco and exiled jazz musicians. That sort of thing.

So it was no surprise that we adopted a cafe of our own. It was our meeting place. Our sanctuary. Not that far from the allotments, and near to the station. A very unprepossessing place, but homely. The couple that ran it were good people. And incredibly tolerant of this group of ne’er-do-wells, brooding and burbling away all afternoon. The bonhomie of Hugh, a one-time artful amateur boxer from Frome strangely, and Helen, the most genial of Geordie girls in her day, meant a lot to us. And they played some incredibly good music on their rickety old tape deck. Lots of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and Motown. That sort of thing. The classics. Good background music for musing and more. We whiled away many a usefully unproductive hour there, sipping suitably stewed tea and devouring Helen’s homebaked scones.

So it was immensely distressing when one day our pleasingly pedestrian routine was disrupted by Hugh and Helen receiving an unnecessarily brusque note from the leaseholder’s agents advising that they were being put on notice, and that plans were being considered by the Council for development of the current premises. We didn’t know what to say. Helen just looked devastated. Hugh was as mad as anything. He punched the wall so hard the signed photos of Charlie Magri and Alan Minter shook in violent appreciation. Looking over at us he said, through tears, we’re not going to sit back and let this happen are we? Absolutely not, we responded as one. But what could we do? Well, we did the usual to start with. Petitions of customers and locals. Letters to the local paper. Calls to the community radio station. Questions to the Citizens Advice Bureau. But that all seemed so futile and flat. Something more was called for. We needed a killer campaign.

Conservation. That was the answer. That’s how things were being saved. For the greater good. But English Heritage were hardly going to ride to the rescue of a humble cafe were they? Well, maybe not. But there were those out there that were very handy when it came to the saving of important cultural artefacts So, we decided, it was time to call on the psychogeographers. To put this into context, I’m not sure that term was even in use back then. I know it came from Guy Debord or something originally, and while we knew the name and pretended to be very up on the Situationists, we knew next to nothing about them really.

We, however, did know about a merry band of hardy souls traipsing across London and the surrounding areas, redrawing maps, uncovering traces, rewriting history, taking pictures, scribbling notes, writing poetry, making films, field recordings, and so on. We knew some of them from contacts in the twilight world of music, fanzines, anarchist bookshops, small presses, and the like. A right rag tag bunch of old eccentrics, but deliciously dedicated, enormously enthusiastic, and once they go the bit between the teeth they really went at it. Bless ‘em. They’re ten a penny now, of course, and you can’t go for a walk without some herbert hobbling along in hiking boots, documenting this that and the other. But back then, nobody knew much about them or what they were up to. Nobody really read them. Nobody really thought much about them. So we were pretty smart tapping into their tremendous energies.
You had to be careful. You couldn’t overegg the pudding. They liked to join the dots their selves. You just had to drop a few hints. Scatter a few clues and rarified references their way. And woosh! Off they went. Rucksacks a gogo. A revival of interest in Antonioni and Blow Up gave us the opportunity, handily enough. That brought groups of the psychos down our way to Maryon Park. We got some contacts to start dropping pointers to the Pretty Things and the Stones, the Dartford delta, the heath and marshes, Shena Mackay and Thom Gunn, Wat Tyler and William Morris, ley lines and roman roads, Roald Dahl and Karl Howman, mystics and wide boys. And how the cafe run by Hugh and Helen was central to all this, a great jumping off point for any excursion and exploration.

Now if there was one thing the psychogeographers knew something about it was good working men’s cafes. They were connoisseurs when it came to ambience and a good fry up. They knew their stewed tea. And once we had dangled the bait, and enticed them out our way, they were truly taken with our homely caff. We let them get their muddy boots under the table, so to speak, before getting the violins out and bemoaning the fact that such a special place was under threat. In other words, light the fuse, and stand back and watch the fun.

Hugh and Helen thought we had lost the plot well and truly. While they welcomed the extra business, they were certainly suspicious of this strange assortment of characters cluttering up their cafe. And they couldn’t see where it was going to lead. But we knew better. We knew the tenacity of these psychogeographers. We knew they didn’t give in easily. We knew they would fall for this suburban wasteland, with its mixture of high brow and lowlife. We knew their hackles would rise when they contemplated the likely fate of the caff. Property speculators were pretty way down on their list of likes, and they needed little encouragement to make life awkward for the chancers intent on turning our caff into a block of one bed apartments for young professionals looking to get their feet on the property ladder. A nation of home owners the Prime Minister wanted us to be. A nation of romantics and explorers the psychogeographers wanted instead.

As I might have mentioned they had friends in unlikely places. Lawyers with specialist tastes who were clients in the secondhand books market. Academics who had not totally forgotten anarchist foibles remained friends. Architects with mystical leanings were in their address books. You get the picture. A few questions asked via their rather useful contacts. A few official letters. A few awkward quasi-official visits. It all accumulates. It all creates unwanted attention and pressure. It can lead to nastiness and it can lead to cold feet. It can easily go either way. Luckily for our reputation the consortium set on destroying one of our few sources of pleasure got a bit tired of all the fuss, and were strangely averse to the hand held cameras rolling and tape machines whirring in their presence. Strange that. And there was us thinking they were such upright citizens.

So while no one really had the good grace to sit down with Hugh and Helen to tell them they had a stay of execution, gradually they came to realise the cafe could continue to serve the best bacon sandwiches in town, and that some way, somehow those oddballs in the hiking boots made this possible. We all drank a toast of strong sweet tea to the psychogeographers. And it was no surprise to us when some of their associates came to be published regularly, and their boots went walking in more hallowed places. But we played a part in their making. And all those films they were making? Well, they still get shown in some of the more out there festivals, and you can see footage of the cafe, the marshes, and so on. If you look really closely you’ll even see somewhere in the credits something like: “With thanks to The Outside of Everything”. I should ask for a copy on DVD I suppose. Just for the record.