Telling Stories
Come On In My Kitchen Savs If you stand in front of a certain hotel in Midtown, New York City, and stare directly ahead of you will see in your immediate field of vision no fewer than three Starbucks coffee shops. The entrances of the two most prominent of them will stare you directly in the face and are separated only by a used bookstore, as grey and dog-eared as the books piled up within it. The third is in a narrow side street. Its existence is revealed by the ubiquitous signage that hangs perpendicularly from above its door and the branding on the paper cups in the hands of the serious, unsmiling people walking briskly towards the crossing ahead of you. The inhabitants of Manhattan take their coffee seriously and it would appear don’t like to travel a long way to find a cup when the craving strikes. In a world where the thoroughly mundane is infinitely customisable the ease with which they order their skinny smoked blonde butterscotch two-pump venti latte with legs is bewildering for a unsophisticated guy from Africa who just wants, without having to overthink it, a little something to knock the spangle off his jet lag. Something tall, dark and strong enough to eat the enamel off an old tin mug would have suited me fine, but I couldn’t specifically find it on offer. With an eye on the overhead menu and an ear bent toward those in front of me in the hope of plagiarising the first thing that I could make sense of I didn’t notice when my turn came up. “What’ll it be?”, repeated the barista for the third time, his eyes not once lifting above the register. “Umm. Oh. A coffee?”, and then in an ultimately futile attempt to fill what was quickly becoming an uncomfortable void in our exchange I threw in a whispered, “please?”.
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