Tea And Torpedoes

Sitting around the bright yellow table that is by now littered with various cardboard containers, and finding yourself uncomfortably shuffling around in your slippery plastic chair as the schoolgirl in the dungarees sweeps around your feet for the second time in five minutes, you cant help but feel slightly intimidated. I mean at what point exactly did these huge multinational companies decide that we no longer required proper china tableware and padded seating.
Once upon a time these places were simply known as cafés. They quite often had formica interiors and they usually placed useful items on their tables like sugar bowls and HP sauce bottles and best of all the only members staff that ever hovered around the seated areas were cheery middle aged ladies with notepads in their aprons, patiently waiting for you to order a sensible mug of tea and a steamed pie.
Most of these welcoming and cozy businesses were run by Italian families who realized the importance of customer service and good honest, affordable and freshly cooked food. Local workers, like bus drivers and shopkeepers, flocked to these establishments for a slab of home made Shepherds Pie and local pensioners called in most days to enjoy a cup of frothy coffee and have a read of the complimentary newspapers they supplied.
So why did we decide to turn our backs on these cozy British cafés in favour of awful open plan coffee joints and fast food halls of today?

The truth is of course we didn’t have any say in the matter,
Apparently these huge multi million pound companies simply muscled there way into our towns and cities by becoming the highest bidders in property auctions, and of course once greedy town center landlords realized that they could command huge rents for thier shops it wasn’t very long before these increases were introduced across the board, forcing these small institutions into less populated out of town locations, they also set about targeting our image conscious youth with there lavish celebrity advertising campaigns. In fact theres nothing teenagers like better now than sitting around chrome tables and eating their dinner out of a large red bucket. Whatever made these places think that they could replace serving freshly prepared sandwiches and rolls containing familiar ingredients like ham and chicken with shrink wrapped baguettes, and whole meal torpedo rolls filled with water cress and lemon juice? Just because the younger generation have been brainwashed into drinking their tea out of a polystyrene cup with a plastic lid on top and expect to pay extra for tomato sauce sachet its no excuse for us older folk to accept it.
These places are not only over priced but they are also uncomfortably over illuminated as well, not even rock bands like Genesis & U2 feel the need for these levels of lighting at their stadium concerts in the mid 1980s.

And old age pensioners have now been exiled to remote and windy park benches where they sip tea from a thermos flask and struggle to keep a firm grip on there daily mail. Once cozy retreats have become as outdated and unfashionable as the jukeboxes that once took pride of place in their alcoves.
So should we all just accept this situation, and pull up a shiny chair at our local food hall
Somehow I think not.


SoapBoxTwo, . still trying to find the salt….