Standing in one of my favourite places in London, halfway across the Charing Cross Bridge, I can’t quite believe that I’m going to leave after nearly 20 years. The lights in the darkness, the water, the buses crossing to and fro in the distance, the Southbank. I could try to write something significant about feeling like London is my home and how I feel connected to it, when it’s one of those cities that no-one can really ever claim as their own. But I figured that was too difficult to write about, for now anyway. I thought, that, instead, I’d write about some of the London places that I love. The ones I’m going to miss. The first one I’m going to write about is also my newest favourite place. I call it Hooch, though that isn’t it’s name. I’m dyslexic. In her poem in the anthology of dyslexic writing called Forgotten Letters, Rebecca Loncraine writes about a surgery she thought at first was a sugary. I guess I did a similar thing with Hooch and the name just stuck: the sugary-effect.
Clinton Cards closed and a new coffee shop took its place. It doesn’t look like much from the outside but over the last few weeks I’ve been coming up with reasons to go that way to work. Basically I’m making excuses to go by there more and more. I found myself not buying coffee from other places, even when I’m on the other side of London, because it won’t be as good. In my dyslexic head it’s called Hooch, but the actual name is Harris and Hoole. Weird to think that for the last seven years I’ve wandered in and out of the same space, only to be slightly dissatisfied by the cards, and now here it is, new and transformed.
I spent December in New Haven, Connecticut once. I remember three things in particular about it: one it was bitterly cold, colder than I’ve ever been, two it snowed so much it was piled high on the sidewalks but the snow ploughs came out and no-one even really talked about it: they just got on with it, and three, there was a coffee shop full of leather sofas where they served great coffee and I would go in there and order something I haven’t been able to get in this country: a breve. The medium one shot latte I get in Harris and Hoole is as close to a Cafe Breve as I’ve had since I got back to this country. You could go into this place in New Haven, order, sit on a sofa, check your emails, eat a bagel, relax, not feel rushed. I used to sit there and write. They sold off the leather sofas when we were there and we would have bought one if we could have worked out a way to bring it back with us. Seems as though Harris and Hoole is modelling itself on the coffee shop in New Haven CT or the North American coffee houses generally. Funny because it’s opened up next door to Starbucks – aggressively so – and that’s the kind of culture Starbucks tried to export, or rather re-export as Chocolate Houses were all the rage in Europe in the 17th and 18th Century. We usually can’t get anywhere near the USA equivalent of a coffee house environment because of space: America has yards of it, and that translates into lots of room for sofas. For some reason the stripped down insides of an ex-Clinton Cards gives a sense of space, even though, when it fills up with Mums and buggies (ours included) it gets a bit crammed.
It’s kind of worrying that I’ve actually started to fantasise about their coffee; it’s probably because I have a toddler and lack of sleep is my biggest problem right now. But it’s embarrassing: it’s hard to act nonchalant when I go in there and I’ve filled up two loyalty cards already.