Café society

Our new "coffee house" in George Street (with Paul and the dogs)

When we had our estate agency in Ribérac, prospective buyers from the UK would speak wistfully of "café society".  I know what they had in mind: those expanses of tables and chairs on the broad pavements of Paris streets, where you can people-watch for hours.  I think they also had some idea of Jean-Paul Sartre and Juliette Gréco on the Boulevard Saint Germain: people dressed in bohemian black, discussing the meaning of life.  The concept was a sort of mish-mash of Sartre and Maurice Chevalier. 

Ribérac's cafés didn't really meet this sort of expectation.  I realised after a while that the people who frequented them most had the time to spare because they didn't spend it on DIY in their houses and gardens.  But they weren't exactly high-grade intellectuals either: they'd have appeared as out of place in les Deux Magots as a ploughman at Versailles.

What's curious, though, is that the English, who started the coffee house idea in London in the eighteenth century, seem to have given it up subsequently.  Starbucks and Costa may be reviled, but they at least reintroduced quality coffee to the UK after the filthy instant brew the English had lived on in previous decades.  I'm not sure that our new Hanushka Coffee House is going to be the haunt for Hastings' answers to Addison and Dryden, let alone Simone de Beauvoir, but for the moment it's a nice place to sit in the morning and watch people strolling through the Old Town.  And, this being a small place, you inevitably see a familiar face and someone to chat with.  Which is, I suppose, what society is all about anyway.

Antony Mair