Holidays, like all good things must come to an end. It is a bummer.
This bum was in our last coffee shop stop in Hong Kong. Kaktus Koffee in Sheung Wang.
The last coffee of our holiday and the last in Hong Kong it may have been, but I had my first taste of a cloud coffee.
My photo opportunities.
And of course I also took a photo of the beautiful floor.
My normal coffee of choice is a simple two shot, short black. However travel is a great way to open the mind. Giddiness in all things is permitted beyond the confines of the day to day.
Coffee giddiness went to some crazy places. Lemon Coffee. Burnt and Salted popcorn coffee, Cloud coffee. My coffee infidelity was rampant. There are others that have currently slipped my mind. Probably because it has become so delightfully open.
December and our travels in Asia and Australia have been punctuated by coffee stops. My winter blogs will be peppered with holiday anecdotes and sunshine photos during January, but the rest of December will be all about Christmas trees in sunny places.
My life in a triangle. The first cup of tea and this blog co-exist in the morning sunshine. I would say that I mostly skip the second stage but when I looked for a photo of a cup of tea there was a biscuit lurking in the corner. Out of the picture is the chair for ‘ a nice sit down’
When I was working, drinking coffee was a much rarer treat. A pleasure when enjoyed in an independent coffee shop and occasionally essential to get me through the working day.
Caffeine is my giddy stimulant of choice. Avoided after noon. A new-to-me, word arrived yesterday more usually associated with the jollity that accompanies alcohol.
What a wonderful new descriptive, these days my bacchian or jovial phase is nearly always fueled by caffeine and sometimes occurs during the nice sit-down phase.
That doesn’t mean I am only jovial or indeed at my most bacchian before noon, the half life of caffeine, in me, is extremely long lived.
This brings the blog to its usual conclusion. My first cup of caffeinated coffee will fire me up to start the day, with every hope of some bacchian moments. No alcohol is required.
If the Aurora Borealis eluded us this weekend , we were a little more lucky with Poisiden. A new piece of street art has recently been created just below Plymouth Hoe. Coffee, a bacon bap and some basking in the sun were the perfect way to start the day with some friends, freshly returned, from Kent.
Although lost,somewhat, in the foreground of the top picture. We found two Poisidens overlooking the sea. A sea swimmer was just dressing as we arrived. Kilt wearing is not de rigueur for sea swimming around the corner in Stonehouse, clearly, the thrust and fumble of post-swimming zones below the Hoe is a much more sartorial event than we are used to.
A no Lycra zone..
Even without the embellishment of Gods of the Sea, the waterfront was a fabulous place to spend an hour or so basking in sunshine and nattering.
We compared notes and experiences of sea swimming in Kent and Plymouth and decided that Plymouth was the easier of the two.
Basking with Poisiden on a Sunday Morning, nothing better.
Concatenation is a wonderful thing. Post proper job I have dabbled in admin and writing for Arts organisations and now in a strange twist of concatenation as a non-tennis player I do admin for a tennis club.
Not ‘just’ a tennis club but a coastal garden and Clubhouse that is available to host community events.
One such community is Rhizome Artists who meet once a week in the clubhouse. Rhizome are Exhibiting locally and the venue of the exhibition has a cafe that does great coffee and cake so a visit was the obvious thing to do.
So coffee, and cake but not concatenation were my anticipated outcomes of the visit.
Early on I met Tim who was taking some standard photographs of the whole exhibition. We had a small natter and he left. I enjoyed my coffee and cake and a lovely wide-ranging conversation with my gentleman companion. We then spent a lot of time enjoying the art, some of which is in the pictures below.
Yesterday we did one of our regular dog walks with the addition of a small granddaughter, who is new to walking with the dogs rather than being pushed. If the dogs can find a hundred different sniffs to slow our progress down. She added another level of procrastination to the experience. Touching the texture of every one of these bollards. There were 30 of them. Each one had a tiny set of fingers gently explore the rough surface.
Wake up and smell the coffee is one way to savour the moment.
Consider the bollards is a whole different level of mindfullness.
With high regard to safety the adults got plenty of time to ponder the meaning of life. And the dogs were more than happy to sniff and leave doggy messages.
Piss Patination
Humans and dogs got plenty of chance to consider this piece of bronze. A decade of dog pee gently arcing across the surface. Or this centuries old mooring bollard.
Its historically old cast-iron is being turned into a bark-like surface from seawater and dog pee. Maybe the last land bollard that Captain James Cook’s dog, Pugwash, pee’d on before setting off for Newfoundland or Australia and New Zealand.
In my city or any other I always like to regularly inhabit coffee shops. Particularly independent or very very small chain coffee shops. As I write this I am heading towards Italy, some would argue that I am heading to the worlds leading coffee nation. I am sure that soon enough I will have some good coffee stories to share.
Car repairs can take you to the most interesting places. Regular readers of this blog will know that I like to hunt out Street Art. I am also a bit dismissive of the lack of good street art in Plymouth. But coffee and the car drew me to Sawrey Street in Millbay yesterday. With an hour or two to waste we fueled up on coffee and comestibles at YaYa’s
YaYa’s had appeared on an invoice for a gardening event I was helping to plan. As the committee sat around discussing the expenses there was an appreciative mumble of cake reminiscing. YaYa’s apparently make exceedingly good cakes.
From personal experience I can also say they make a great take out coffee for a street wander. Historically Sawrey Street was part of a network of streets that made up the notorious Plymouth red light district. Technology, regeneration and new residential blocks have changed things in this area which has a daytime economy of light industrial use. There are a lot of building sites and artists are encouraged to add Graffiti to the security hoardings that encircle emerging new hotels and apartment blocks.
What I had not realised is that notable British Street artists have been commissioned to place art in the small streets and alleys of Millbay.
The area still has echoes of notoriety and I probably wouldn’t poke around in these tiny back streets at night but that is often where the best Street Art exists. I am just amazed that I have never thought to look here before.
The curious thing about Street Art in Plymouth is that for the most part it stays pristine. Nobody over-sprays a tag or adds a sticker or a stencil of their own. Plymouth does not do Palimpsest Street Art. The worst that probably happens on these works is a drunken pee and they probably do witness whatever remains of the illicit night time economy in this once notorious area.
Back in the ( time) zone. A day of homecoming chores. Getting our composite door serviced and a new handle fitted. Prescriptions collected and electricians contacted. Honestly the Tim Horton coffee was an unplanned Canadian throwback. As it happens, Hugo and Lola, who will never visit Canada, rather like a small portion of traditional ‘timbits’
In other throwbacks of the day I visited the trusty Abebooks, secondhand book store to catch up on two book purchases which travelling with only hand luggage had made conpletely impossible during our travels. First up the Chicago Diner Cook Book.
And secondly the book published to accompany the Nick Cave exhibition that we went to at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Our Toronto catch up purchases were supplied by John Lewis who sell the brand Atheleta, even better all items were in the sale. So now we have compression leggings which would have stopped our feet getting plump and puffy on our flights. Back to normal now.
Facebook reminds me that it is five years since I was in North America. That is a timely reminder as yesterday we had planned a North American experience.
Lets be honest a coffee in an independent Coffee Shop, Hot Black Coffee, in Toronto is a very different experience from a Tim Horton coffee, but needs must and we are in Plymouth not Canada. Tim Horton opened in Plymouth yesterday.
Now that was the plan. But domestic life got in the way and inadvertantly solved a year old problem.
When we moved house a year ago we had made a grab bag of important documents and items that must not be lost. The plan was that one of us would grab the, highly visible, leopard print clutch bag, and move it safely from one house to the other. That didn’t happen and neither of us know how. The bag has been missing for over a year. The contents were so important that every room in the new house has been turned upside down and inside out several times. The loss of some of these items has been crucial and the 6 month wait for new passports is probably the most painful result of our loss.
We were up early yesterday to visit Tim Horton’s for breakfast. In the quiet of the morning there was the sound of a drip in our utility room.
Our utility room is know as the ‘Futility Room’ as it is too small for its true purpose and yet somehow is a perfect store room, and loo!
We had to move a lot of stuff to get at the drip. Having located and fixed the fault we decided to reconfigure some of the shelving installed by our diligent removal men. Unbelievably behind the shelving the Leopard print clutch bag was resting, safely holding all of our important things. One of the removal men must have picked it up, tucked it under his arm and moved it with the shelving and then just put it to one side at the new house. That is the end of a year of puzzlement. It was also the end of breakfast at Tim Horton’s. We did drive over at 2pm having mentally swapped breakfast for doughnuts but the rest of Plymouth had got there before us. Huge queues for drive-thru and eat in. Maybe we will go back, maybe not. In less than a month we are Toronto bound, the queues will be shorter there and we can also go independent. After 5 years we may well do both.
Quite the command on my early morning walk. Our usual, quiet, morning walk was enlivened by the arrival of many vendors for the monthly food and craft market. This coffee shop got our business later in the day. The sun was super bright, but the temperature was only just above zero. Beyond a dog walk I was also up early to catch some mussels in the sharply angled sunshine.
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