Wfrom the same case almost every day during our month long trip to Venice. Which is the same thing on my last journeyits windows are full of dry-looking cookies, Barbie-pink nougat bars and souvenir tins with a view of the Rialto, while pigeons circle around the door as if daring to enter. Inside the show was a case of arteries, a shelf of aperitifs never touched and a modified coffee machine behind a high counter. It’s always packed: students, dog walkers, office workers, the postwoman, dithering tourists and the bravest pigeons, eating crumbs.
I recognized the staff, although they clearly didn’t recognize me, what with the 2.1 million tourists flying past each year. But little by little we entered the ecosystem in the morning and, after 10 days, the tall guy who was working on the machine started saying:Normal and long?” with the coffee smashed to the front. In week three, one of the most busy mornings, he caught my eye as the coffee was already made and I gestured, waiting on the counter. Cutting to claim, I felt like, I don’t know, George Clooney? Or at least a pigeon with recognizable features that they did not bother to kick.
It made me think about bringing home my feelings about the experience of “being regular”, which are historically ambiguous. I miss the connection in the life of the lonely screen-watcher, and the short conversations when they visit the usual places, they feel like brilliant and small gifts. of inquiry It shows that weak ties – we see our bonds with people and interact with the smallest – make us happier. But there are days when everything in my life is a garbage fire, I am spotted, shapeless and sad; when you need a cake, but don’t make jokes. Sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with that – I’m rebellious, a little juvenile, I want to be known. It was a beautiful part in the New York Times last year a proper antidote to loneliness, but one line from the author’s cream hanging in my room softening the blood: “The tosser of the genista, sat next to me to ask what I should write. Edepol! Run away!
It’s not that I believe I should give or withhold some kind of reward for a few minutes of boring chat with me. What’s more is that I sometimes get the perplexing feeling that both parties become entangled in the inevitable web of social obligation. I don’t think I’m alone in experiencing a kind of vertigo at times when the bonds threaten to weaken. Is it the overly urbane British story of a foreign family member striking a nod with years of exchange during a one-day conversation that you then had to get up hours earlier to avoid? We go to the great cities, to keep our bonds weaker with water, to break ourselves without anyone saying, “O stained ones, will you drink now?” or: “You look nice today!” That 50 pubs closed in the first half of this year In England and Wales we have fewer suggestions on the market for a place where no one knows your name.
But gradually, I think, I shed the atmosphere. Moving to my house was a kind of acceptance of a mixed blessing known because you are regular everywhere if you live somewhere long enough. This has helped me get more links – the joy of places where everyone knows your order, at least. Yes, that means also getting known as completely predictable, cake-dependent, often inarticulate and unwashed, and the odd chat when you’re the least on one’s mind. But I began to understand that he was caught up – that he was trapped – in the web of inescapable social obligation that is life.
In Venice, he himself tried to strengthen my weak state: on the day of my birthday I told myself “fifty today” (5 today) and by chance the staff politely congratulated me, then completely ignored me. The other travelers talked to me about nothing but coffee and a solution, because I’m not really a regular there. But here I am, and more beautifully.