Miss Cranston’s Tearoom is one of the more select places of refreshment and consistently reliable civility as a given of customer service. Located in Gordon Street (a name almost synonymous with civility as those who know me had better testify), in the centre of Glasgow, it’s within a minute’s slow walk from Border’s Bookshop. If you are there at the right time you are shown to a window seat from whence to watch all kinds of people anticipating, transacting or reflecting on their various retail experiences; conversing, arguing or walking along in silence – companionably warm or post-stooshie chill. Sit long enough you see both.
On my recent visit I ordered the individual rhubarb tart and a cafetiere of Blue Mountain coffee. In the discreetly sedate surroundings, sitting at the table with the crisp white cover, and enjoying the joys of refined and leisurely self-indulgence, I discovered the embarrassing problem of the cafetiere with the stuck plunger. I began with a slow even pressure downwards, intending to watch the coarse ground coffee being gently pushed down as the dark brown liquid gathered above. Feeling some resistance I pushed harder, then a little harder, and on the assumption this was an easily overcome technical challenge, a little harder still. The result was an impressive impromptu coffee fountain accompanied by a loud attention drawing clatter of metal on glass. The consequences were neither discreet nor pretty. And within seconds the manager was over, took away the tray, cleaned the table, apologised for the mess (which I’d made), and brought me a fresh and bigger cafetiere of that kind of coffee that makes you aware that not all blessings were lost in the aftermath of the Fall.
As mentioned, Borders is only a minute’s walk away and I was on the hunt for a book for Sheila. Milan Kundera’s elegiac novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is a profound narrative reflection of the nature of human choices, which tend to be risks we cannot assess beforehand, guesses at happiness, decisions which all but determine the future. Ah but I wasn’t after Kundera’s considered probing of the human capacity to build, break or endure relationships. I was after a novel with only one word of difference in the title, The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, by Alexander McCall Smith. Holiday reading as a gift. To give a story as a gift is to encourage those we care about to take an inner holiday, the rest and recreation that comes from going someplace else through imaginative literature. In that sense a gift wrapped book is a package holiday.
Not a bad Saturday morning.
Two Cafetiere Disaster Haiku
One
Showing off brute strength,
malfunctioning cafetiere,
coffee eruption.
Two
Coarse ground coffee grain
spews and spreads like speckled mud,
‘I’m that embarrassed!’
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