‘Tis the season to be quite jolly, rather merry and to take a break from the writing life. But then, there’s that itch at the end of one’s fingers, a keyboard tapping away by itself at midnight, or the pages of one’s journal aching to be filled and satisfied. It’s barely five o’clock on a warm summer morning and already I’m sitting at my desk, watching as words unfurl, and I’m aware of the draft that needs to be consolidated and saved as a *.pdf, then printed so I can let my red pen run riot: a confession, I cannot perform a first edit on-screen.
For a while, a small group has met every Tuesday morning to sit around a table, write and natter over coffee and croissants. Sometimes it has been more talk than writing, or we’ve each distributed a page of a work in progress, and offered critiques. Sandra & Ken, Geoff, Anna, Wendy and others have joined the table at various times, but this winter was hard, illness and work cutting into our numbers.
We’ve drifted from place to place, from the old Wintergarden, to Café Casse-Croûte, Hahndorf Chocolates and some others, before settling into the Barista Bar at DU Waterfront. Parking is always difficult in Geelong CBD, but at least it’s accessible by public transport, and the staff are polite. I like being there, for from our table I can glimpse the sea and sky, and when there’s a lull in the traffic, hear seagulls. Maybe next year, I’ll try to move into one of the cafés on Cunningham Pier.
We could hire a seminar room upstairs, or arrange for a table in one of the local libraries, so why go to a café, other than emulating the crowd at Les Deux Magots? A café is a meeting place where all types of people come and go. There’s the fat professor and her clique who take the far corner at 10:30 every morning to raucously dissect everyone in the department, the CMFEU boys clustered around their visiting delegate, mulling over their lattés and kombuchas, the very sketchy overseas post-grad making eyes at the waitresses, and then, outside the glass doors, standing and waiting for a taxi, a visiting poet and his daughters: all characters for my next chapter.
Besides, the stream trickling out of a library’s tinny machine is really only fit for the young and desperate. Real coffee, good coffee, the stuff that drives a short story to its bitter end, that elevates a closing couplet to new heights of fancy, only comes from a Gaggia Academica or similar beast, heaving and fuming great geysers of steam, pishshshsh! and flaaah!, as the pony-tailed boy tamps and stamps the precious grains into golden elixir. Fresh aromas waft to our table, and pens begin to race across paper.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ted Reilly joined Geelong Street Poets in the mid-1970s. He is a founding member of GW, now enjoying U3A Art classes, attending a writing group and cruising blue oceans.
Contact details:
You can email Ted here.
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Bridh Hancock
I like it, but may I offer another venue: Pistle Petes’