What I miss most

I was sorting out my receipts the other day (yes, you’re right, I am running out of things to do in lockdown) and I felt like I was sifting through papyrus texts from a lost civilisation. Here was a map of my previous life measured out, like TS Eliot’s’ Prufrock, in coffee spoons.

Part of my experience of The New Normal has been that, like most people, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not doing any gigs or workshops and, thanks to a BBC microphone-andheadphone set, I can record my Radio 3 show at home, so I’m like a long-life bulb: I’m not going out.

I’ll tell you what I miss most about this enforced domesticity. As I hinted earlier, I miss the espresso in the café, I miss the tiny white cup and the gleaming white saucer. I miss the way the espresso sits there like a tiny inland sea, daring you to gulp it in one. I like the way that the espresso, once gulped in one, reminds you of its presence with a fizzing in your brain’s frontal lobes that can sometimes last for hours, depending on the size of your lobes of course.

I gazed at the crumpled receipts and each one told a story: the early cuppa in the station café, the sandwich from the takeaway and my favourite – the espresso in the hotel bar. I love hotel bars anyway, the way they collect drifters and businesspeople, couples on blind dates and poets like me who feel like they’re in an Edward Hopper painting.

Every Thursday, when I went across to Salford to record my show, I’d always call in at a hotel near the studios and get one of those aforementioned espressos in one of those aforementioned tiny white cups. I’d sit in a window seat and gaze out at the people walking purposefully by and somehow, even though I’m not a sophisticated man by any means, I would feel sophisticated.

The last time I called in this hotel bar was just before the lockdown. The bar was deserted apart from me and a bloke gazing at the vast TV set on the wall, his mouth hanging open as though he was trying to swallow the news whole. Someone came in and started desultorily dusting a chair, and then dusting it again. The barman was the one who usually served me and as he gave me the coffee and the receipt I asked him how things were going. ‘Look around,’ he said, gesturing over the room’s wasteland, ‘we’re all just hanging on by the skin of our teeth.’ I sat in the window seat but didn’t feel sophisticated. I just felt sad. When I got up to go, I wished the barman luck. ‘You too, my friend,’ he said, smiling. ‘We’re all going to need it.’

I’ve got the receipt from that final drink of The Old Life next to me as I write this. I’ll save it. I might even frame it.

Every receipt tells a story, as the old saying almost goes.