MICHAEL Morrison, the central character in my novel The Choreography Of Ghosts (available to pre-order now from Amazon or my website at www.andrew-mosley.co.uk), has become disillusioned with life and fallen out of love with words following the critical and commercial failure of his second book Walks Through Weeping Cities. We join him as he takes one of those walks…
I DON’T know the stats but the good old English cup of tea has taken a fair old thwacking from its old rival coffee.
It’s immediately evident as I cross from the railway station and head towards the hill that will take me into this cruel and unforgiving city.
Smug faces topped with bobble hats or wrapped in fake fur-lined hoods sit above bodies whose gloved hands clutch £4-a-time cups of mocha-, cappu-, frappu- and a host of other fancily named variants of ccino as they negotiate their way through the snow turned to slush towards the main shopping hub, where purchases will be made to achieve their flawed versions of contentment and happiness.
The bearded man slouched in the filthy doorway of a not yet open takeaway must surely be bitterly aware of the cruel irony as he holds out an empty landfill-destined cup in the hope of raising a few quid from sympathetic or guilt-filled lifestyle coffee (I don’t dislike the drink, by the way, and drink coffee and tea) quaffers.
I immediately feel uncomfortable. Wrong not to give but somehow less culpable for not slurping a steaming hot middle class beverage as I shuffle by.
It didn’t used to be like this. Where have the greasy spoons and traditional cafes gone? The ones in and around bus stations and old-style shopping parades where people would put down their heavy bags of groceries, order a 50p cup of tea and rest their weary legs? Ah tea, best drink of the day, some old advert claimed.
Coffee, the USA of hot beverages, has invaded and sent these places scurrying into hiding but no 50p equivalent replaces them. There’s no chip butty with your latte.
As I move on up the hill the new world is there for all to see; coffee shop, wine bar, coffee shop, wine bar… vape store, tattoo parlour, Turkish barber, coffee shop, bookies, coffee shop, wine bar…
The old cafe, like the traditional pub, has largely gone, shunted off to neglected out of town areas whose chippy, convenience store, cash point and hairdresser are neighbours of the estate boozer.
The brown tourist signs don’t point this way. The attractions aren’t there, the galleries or the museums, though in some ways those areas have become decaying monuments to the past.
They’re not far away though, easy to find, and as I continue through the city - it could be any city - rather than finding its gentrification a positive I become nostalgic for a past that can no longer cater for its working classes and angry with a present that no longer wishes to.
I buy nothing, save for a CD and the local paper. Who buys CDs these days? Who buys local papers? I do.
I take them to a pub - a proper one - and pay less for a pint than most do for their coffee.
The CD booklet offers less in the way of aesthetics or feel than the old inner sleeves of vinyl once did and the newspaper is thin, full of irrelevant non-local lifestyle content.
Like tea, they are struggling, but still hanging on in there. Just like the homeless man in the takeaway door who, following a combination of guilt, sympathy and understanding, I decide to give some money to, only to find him gone.
There are many others like him, all who have migrated to the city centre where the wealth supposedly is. Those brown tourist signs don’t point to them either and soon they will be pushed out to sit by the cashpoint and the decaying out of town shopping parade.
No trace of them ever having existed here.