Adventures in writing

Cooped up in the house for yet another session of Monday morning I'm so crap blues I thought I'd try a new tack. It started with a Cornetto for lunch (mint and choc chip) and ended with the realisation that armed with a laptop and pocketfuls of my change jar any chic coffee shop could be my office.

Fortunately this being Newport it's not hard to find a coffee house that bustles with the industry of a dozen artistic types tapping away on their laptops. I hit the mother lode in fact - not just a coffee shop, but a coffee AND card shop. Nothing else screams out intellectual thinkers than hand made greetings cards priced at three pounds and above with droll quotations from Oscar Wilde and Woody Allen.

In fact it wasn't just a card and coffee shop, it was a card, coffee AND women's hairdressers. Had I realised then I might just have kept on walking to my local and entered the daily arm wrestling contest (one prize: honour). But I was comitted and I wasn't going to be fazed by the ranks of Bella and Chat magazines beneath those big perm machines. I marched right on past them and up the stairs to the coffee section, the wittily name "The Loft".

That's where I met Henry, my Barrista for the day. Poor Henry. Poor, poor Henry.

With his love of bicep curls and very tight T-shirts, with a glass stud in each ear he treated me to a broad smile and fluttered what I hoped were genetically predetirmined long lashes.

"And what would you like?" he said.

He poured me my coffee, and then added, "With room for some...milk?"

I guess his face was shot so full of Botox that's why his pencil thin eyebrows weren't oscillating suggestively.

"Care to try one of my muffins?"

I thanked him kindly, and said no, going over to a seat by the window and took out my laptop.

He flounced around, clattering cups with wild abandon, counting the change in the tip jar. From time to time he'd join in with songs on the radio. At one point a song by the Scissor Sisters came on and he falsettoed his way over to the radio and spent an inordinate amount of time bending over to tune it in.

I sighed to myself. He must have sensed that I was a writer. Was it the uncombed hair? The baggy, faded and crumpled polo shirt?

Or the tortured look of a soul trying to create?

Somebody (I forget who) once wrote that "with great power comes great responsibilty."

I would do well to remember that, especially around male hair dressers. Poor Henry. His only crime was to be smitten.

That's when the old lady came in. Wearing a raincoat and pitched over almost double, with thick glasses like safety glass on her face.

"And what would you like?" Henry asked her. "Room for some...milk? See anything that catches your eye?"

If anything he was speaking with super italics.

I took my laptop and I slunk away.

Trod in some dog shit on my way home.