Writing Lessons From The Coffee Shop

This week I’m writing about coffee places and what they mean to me as a writer. Thanks to Beth Kempton for this idea.

This week I’m remembering that it wasn’t always a given. Some years, with my parents and brother, we didn’t go further than our own county.

There was the year we visited the safari park. Then the year we drove around every farm in the Bow of Fife, where my dad grew up. He pointed out the primary schools he’d attended along the way. Most of them are now private homes.

One memory keeps surfacing, though. It was prompted by Beth Kempton’s piece on coffee shops — afternoon tea, Scottish style.

There was the Co-op tea room upstairs: Silver service, uniforms, that murmur and the echo you get in a big, open room. My uncle’s wedding reception was held there. I was a flower girl, wearing a yellow scratchy net dress, my hair pulled tight with flower pins stuck in. I complained about it all day. By evening, once the band started, I was twirling on the wooden dance floor, my cheeks bright red – even though the photo is black and white!

Further along the High Street was the Green Cockatoo, up over the shops, which was a bit more exclusive. We went in 1976 - it would be July because that was my mum’s birthday and also my parents anniversary.

I know the year because it was the last big heatwave, and the year of the ladybirds. We sat at the window. I can’t remember the cake, or whether I even had tea rather than coke. I do remember watching a huge swarm of ladybirds move down the street to settle on the parked cars, polka-dotting all of them in black and red.

Coffee shop culture has exploded since then. Our own quiet High Street, a mile of promenade with supermarkets at one end, now has coffee shops at almost every turn. Independents, a Costa, a Starbucks, a Greggs, even one tucked inside the theatre. Coffee and cake used to be an occasion. Now it’s just the landscape of the High Street.

Photo by Jackie Morrison: Coffee Shop next to a Bookshop anyone? Cambridge

Nobody drank coffee in our house when I was small. My grandad drank Camp Coffee, that strange bottled essence you stirred into boiling water. My dad picked up a taste for Nescafé at work. Tea shops were somewhere you went for an occasion, a treat.

Maybe that’s what I’m still looking for, whenever I stop for coffee now. Not the coffee itself, but the atmosphere around it. There’s a small café inside an art gallery near me that gives me something of that same feeling: wooden panelling, wooden-backed chairs, the low clatter of cups. Sitting there, I can travel backwards and forwards at once, remembering those old tea rooms, imagining the lives that passed through this one. Somehow, in that atmosphere, the words come easier.

How many of us missed this during lockdown? Just sitting alongside other people.

I wrote thousands of words with headphones on, coffee-shop ambient music playing in the background, pretending there were other people somewhere doing exactly the same thing. We weren’t really trying to recreate the coffee shop. We were trying to recreate the feeling of not being alone.

I understand that even more now. Since my brother died earlier this year, coffee shops have become places of comfort for me. Friends have taken me out for coffee, or a walk and then coffee, and we’ve talked. Sometimes about how I’m doing. Often not. Ordinary things. Watching people come and go. It wasn’t always about finding the right words for loss. Sometimes it was just about not being alone with it.

Photo by Jackie Morrison: coffee shop, Dundee, Scotland

Running a small independent café isn’t easy. There’s rent, wages, rising costs, all sitting behind the price of a cup of coffee. These places offer something beyond what’s on the menu. Somewhere to linger, to meet, to write, to remember, to simply be alongside other people. Supporting them means more than buying the odd coffee. It means choosing the little independent place when it would be easier not to. Staying for the second cup. Buying the cake. Telling someone about it. Making another date to meet. By doing that, we keep these spaces open and alive.

Here’s where it comes full circle for me. My last full-time job was in a beautiful old building in town. The gardens, the closeness to the sea, there was something about the place that got into my bones.

I was weary of that management job, and some part of me clearly knew it was time for a change. It was there that I put in my notice knowing that I was going to put the effort into me and my writing because life is too short.

Not long after I left, that building became the café it is today. Now other people sit at those same tables, looking out at the same sea, working through their own lives. Supporting friends. Coming to decisions. Sometimes just having me-space.

Don’t underestimate the power of a coffee shop.

Will you be writing or reading in a special place this week?

Here’s the historic building where I used to work from!

Photo, Jackie Morrison: Here’s the historic building where I used to work from!

Love from Jackie in the Little Writing Corner in Scotland

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PS: Cafes often feature in my short stories. Most recently one of my stories, Saving The Boat Shed, featured a cafe by a harbour. Wonder where that idea came from?! I also have a cafe featuring strongly in a recent submission, and I’ll update you if that one is accepted/goes to print!

and a link to the Beth Kempton piece that prompted this stack!!

A Love Letter to Cafe Owners - the Beth Kempton piece that prompted my memories!