Coffee Date

I was wandering down St Peter’s Street earlier today when I heard a voice yell out behind me.

“Eey!”

I turned around to have a look, presuming it to be one of those random cries you hear every so often on the streets of Bedford, and saw David, the local window-cleaner, calling out to me from Amici with a big waving arm like one of the puppets in the old Fireman Sam.

I think that’s the first time a provocative street yell has been actually intended for me. There was something quite satisfying about it.

“Hello, David!” I yelled.

“The cafe’s closed!” he yelled back. “Come on!”

I joined David in Amici, which was empty of staff and all. What a little privilege and a treat it is to step inside a closed restaurant in the middle of the day!

Until today, I didn’t realise David mopped floors and cleaned the toilets as well. I thought he just did the windows for the local businesses. But he’d obviously just finished up when I found him because the mop was neatly resting by the till, the floors were shiny, and he’d made himself a coffee.

Eighty-seven is, without a doubt, a ridiculous age to still be cleaning toilets, especially as he himself has admitted he doesn’t need the money. And yet, I still let him make my coffee for me… I would have done it myself, but I haven’t used one of those clunky machines since working in the pub years ago. Not to mention, David was the one with the keys to the restaurant, not me… I was only doing the right thing by letting the octogenarian wait on me hand and foot.

So we sat there, and we had our little coffee date in the dark, empty restaurant, and I told David about my potential job in the prison. It all felt perfectly timed, for some reason, and in the best possible way. Perfect timing is community timing, I think. Those are the real synchronicities, the ones small enough to miss because they’re embedded within the casual warmth of local town friendliness.

I could have told David that the usual cafe was, in fact, open today… but before I had a chance to consider it, I was already wrapped up in the quaint loveliness of sharing a quiet coffee in wholly unexpected way.

We left Amici, its floors all clean and ready for the staff to return for the evening hours, and David locked up. He then got on his bike, the eighty-seven-year-old, and outpaced me down the High Street.

Bedford: my very own Pontypandy!