Using Coffee as an Analogy for Parental Aspirations

I love my coffee, particularly at the weekends. There’s a mug right here in front of me now, steaming away. I make it pretty roughly, without much trace of finesse. Although I do have my little routine which I think I picked up during my years in a lovely architectural practice in North London.

Here’s what I do.

I have a cafetiere, one of those big ones. I heat it up with a good splash of boiling water and then I put the plunger/lid part back on and swish the boiling water around, just to get everything nicely warmed up. Then I get the lid off again, throw out the water, and shovel in maybe three dessertspoons of ground coffee. I bring the kettle back up to boiling and then I pour the boiling water into the warm cafetiere until it’s between half and three quarters full. I stir the coffee with the dessert spoon, getting up quite a swirl, and then I ‘backwater’ with the spoon until the coffee is nice and still again. Then I put the lid back on and set the plunger down to the surface of the coffee and I leave it a while and then I plunge it at some random moment, about five minutes later.

That’s how I do it. (Takes a sip) It’s grand.

The coffee itself is nothing overly special. It’s a bag from Tesco. I tend to favour Colombian, more out of habit than anything else, and I keep it in a sealed thing in the fridge because, like I said, I only tend to make coffee on the weekend so one bag lasts me for quite a while.

My eldest son was home for Christmas. We all had a great time together. John is in his final year at University. If I say which one and he happens to read this then he will accuse me of bragging so I won’t... but I am.

He brought with him his own coffee routine which he inherited from his American housemate. It is quite different to mine. That is mostly the point. Up until Christmas, he was using his housemate’s kit to make his coffee but co-ordinated gifts from a number of different sources combined cleverly to the effect that he now has a kit all of his own.

Here’s how he goes about his coffee making.

He has his Chemex, which is a very elegant and scientific-looking beaker, his little silver hot water pot with the tiny spout, his special (very expensive) filter papers, his coffee grinder, his weighing scales and his fairly specialised coffee beans.

First, he_

Wait, you don’t want to know really, do you? You can look it up if you want. It’s a brilliant routine of grinding, weighing, blooming and measuring. It fills the house with the most amazing coffee smell and I’ve been granted a taste or two over the holiday and it’s fabulous. Almost worth the effort.

I take such pleasure in John’s coffee making routine. It’s so much better than mine. So careful, so considered, so refined and with a far superior outcome.

You can see where my mind is going with this. It’s just such a neat example of what I wish for my sons and what I reckon so many of us wish for our kids. To know more than we do, to do things better than we ever did, to make better things for themselves than we ever did.

That’s all really.

Except for one fairly obvious glance backwards.

To my own Dad.

If my Dad had been around to read about my own simple coffee routine, he would have grinned and scratched his head in gentle disbelief. For him, the hot drink of choice was a mug of tea. A teabag in a cup or, on a good day, a couple of teabags in a pot. The extent of my own dicking around with Cafetieres and Colombian grounds would have been a source of mystery to him and probably some gentle ribbing from him too.

But I bet he would also have felt a bit like I do. 

I was the first who was able to go to third level education, although my older brother has since gone far further than I ever did. He would have noted how things were coming better for me than they had been for him. How he had managed to provide a sort of a ladder, to let the one coming after go up that step higher, if they wanted to. 

I bet he would have felt a little like I felt at Christmas, whenever that refined coffee smell came creeping down the hall.

Mission, if only partly, accomplished.

The Bainbridge Way

Gary Bainbridge is an online pal who has been writing a weekly column for the Liverpool Echo for many years. Last Friday, he published his last column.

I, for one, will miss them greatly and I know of many others, for many, who will miss them too. 

His columns, or at least the best of, are collected in his books which you can peruse and buy here if you’d like to see what I’m going on about.

You can also visit with him on his website https://garybainbridge.com/ or on his Twitter, which is particularly good.

Bloody hell, this is starting to sound like a feckin’ infomercial or something. Get to the point, Ken.

The point is that I thought I would do a little tribute to Gary by writing this week's post in the manner in which he evidently did so many of his. Gary impressed me hugely by being able to deliver, week on week, an account of some event from his previous week which met all the criteria of a Bainbridge Column. It would be mildly self-deprecating, it would be funny, it would be true and, most impressively, it would have that elusive tinge of real humanity that is so hard to capture. I feel I manage this myself about once a year here on my own pages. Gary did it every week.

So I challenged myself. I would stop and think about my week and I would try to identify a ‘column worthy’ moment which had occurred. Then I would tell it without sparing myself and I would hope that, somewhere along the way, a little humanity would leak in too. I didn’t want to try to mimic Gary’s style or anything like that. I just wanted to find a thing that wasn’t a thing before I went looking for it and make something out of it.

So I literally lay on the bed and thought about my week. What had I done? What had happened? Where was my column? Eventually something rose to the surface. I wrote it down. Reading it, you might think that I just took this week's blog post and stuck a 'Gary Bit' here on the front of it. That's not what happened though. This little event was gone from my mind until I resurrected it and related it in the service of a column. That's the whole point. 

It's not very funny, like Gary's stuff is, that's the only thing.

Anyway, with very best wishes to Gary on the next stage of his career, here goes.

*                                   *                       *                       *

There’s a local shop I go to sometimes. It’s down the road and through the estate and you can cut into it through a sort of walkway between two houses. It’s a bit too far to walk when you’re in a hurry so I drive and park in the housing estate and walk through.

Are you with me so far?

The thing is, there’s a bunch of men who sometimes hang around the entrance to this walkway after dark. They are tall and roughly dressed and are clearly Eastern European. They sip cans of cut price beer and mutter among themselves. To get to the shop, you have to go through them.

The other night, I got my milk in the shop and came back to the car, ‘good-nighting' my way through the tall silent cohort of drinkers as I passed. When I reached the car, I found that I had accidentally left the hazard warning lights on. The battery in the car hasn’t been that good of late, not nearly good enough for stray hazard warning lights to be left on. I turned the key and the engine replied with the faintest of ‘thur-hur-hurrs’. The battery was as flat as a pancake.

At the sound of my fatigued engine, the drinking cohort all turned as-one and stared at me. They were about twenty feet away, gathered tight together, gazing united in through my windscreen. If I had working headlights, I reckon they would have illuminated their faces in a rather scary way.

If I have one good quality, I think it is that I trust people. These men, glaring at me in my car, did not worry me. If there was trouble to be found it would not be lessened by my worrying about it. Some would call it naivety. I won’t start calling it that until it goes wrong for me. That hasn’t happened yet.

I hopped out of the car.

“Hey, guys!”

The guys didn’t turn. They were already turned.

“You have… problem?”

“The battery is flat. I left the lights on.”

“We saw.”

“Any chance… of a push?”

The men all put down their cans in synchronicity and walked over to my little Opal.

“Get in. Two gear, yes? Two gear?”

I climbed in and popped the stick into second gear, I knew the drill.

The men pushed. I eased the clutch. The engine rattled but didn’t go. We tried again. Push, pop, rattle. No go.

One of the men came up to the driver’s door.

“I try?” he said.

I hopped out and he hopped in. This time I helped with the pushing. The men made room at the back for me. We were running out of street but the man in the car eased the clutch and the engine fired into life. He was better at it than me.

The car pulled away from us and the man drove away in my car. Off up around the corner and gone. You have to do that, to warm it up. The engine might stop again otherwise.

To pass the time while he was gone, I shook hands with all the men and thanked them profusely and, by the time I was finished, the driver man was back with my car. I thanked him too.

The men seemed warmed by having been asked for help. Or maybe it was just all that pushing.

As I drove away, waving back to them, I thought about driving round to the main entrance to the shop and slipping in and getting them a six-ring of their favourite beer. I would have gladly done that. Gladly. But I didn’t. Instead, I went home.

I felt that the purity of my asking for help and receiving it was a far better thing than me looking to pay them off for their natural warmth and kindness. I felt the men would feel the same.

Maybe to some readers that may seem a bit silly, even a bit cheap on my part. That’s okay. Deep down, I know it’s not silly or cheap at all. An assumption of mutual understanding is always for the best. 

That's what I reckon anyway.

Finishing Strong –Simon Ricketts and Me

Sometimes, after posting one of my Sunday blogs, I might get a message from Simon saying something like, “I figured you’d be writing about this today so I swung by to have a read.” Simon would certainly have figured what I would be writing about late into last night and this morning but, alas, he won’t be swinging by to see it.

When a person dies, I like to say just like that, ‘they died’. But for Simon, I think ‘passed on’ is actually a better fit. Simon has died but he has also very much passed on.

He has passed on to a special place in the many hearts where he will be alive forever.

He has passed on into legend.

I was lucky enough to meet Simon a couple of times but our friendship was mostly enacted through Twitter and, more recently, over on Facebook too. A lot of the interaction was public but there was also the considerable underbelly of messaging where more personal truths were often exchanged.

At first, we were all part of a social media cohort. A loose community of folk who tended to drift in and out of each other’s consciousness. At the centre of this amorphous collective, there were a bunch of people who just seemed to get along really well. I imagine there were a thousand such collectives – maybe a million – across the entire social media universe. But ours felt a bit special… perhaps they all did. This fellowship gently disbanded over time, as fellowships tend to do, but a kernel of people never quite managed to let each other go. We might not have spoken every day or even every week but we remained strangely ‘aware’ of each other. Our little successes raising us all up a little, our trials pricking our collective hearts.

Simon was a firm part of that collective but, man, he was so much more too. He was a superb communicator, always sharp and witty, kind yet edgy all at once. As was the case with many of us then, his life played out a little week by week on Twitter. I will always remember his Saturdays in particular, going to the match, retiring with his great friend Glen to the pub for a couple of pints, taking in the ‘turn’ then home to the cats for a late pizza.

We always got on really well, Simon and me. I like to think it was empathy that played a part in loosely binding us together. We both seemed to have a lot of empathy for stuff. We understood how that could be both a blessing and a curse.

So that was it. Simon Ricketts. To me, a valued member of a loose collective. A free-flowing social media friendship, slowly formed. That was enough, it was plenty.

But then he went and did something that amazed me. He came to see me. He hired a car and he came to Ireland and he drove over here to the west coast to my town. To come to see me.

We had us a day. I wrote about it here. We drove around and I showed him stuff, we walked a little and sat and ate seafood and drank a pint or two at the end of the day after the driving was done. He said he had wanted to meet me and I sure as hell wanted to meet him.

I think his coming all this way to see me illustrates an important aspect of who Simon was. I think it can serve as a microcosm of his overall wonderfulness. Maybe he just wanted to see me, like he said. Maybe that was the beginning and the end of it. But I don’t think so. I think he sensed that perhaps I needed to see someone, someone real from out of all the internet relationships I have come to lean quite heavily on. I was so remote, you see, that sometimes my absence from the occasional meetups would make me feel isolated and not really belonging. By coming all this way, to see me, he did me a huge service. It was a boost that still boosts me to this very day, many years along. He made me feel a bit important.

And, yes, there it is. The microcosm. Isn’t that what Simon did so well? He made his friends feel a bit important. Regardless of whether they were online sketches of people or real flesh and blood folk. He made us feel important. And it wasn’t any sleight of hand or three card trick he was pulling when he did it. No. We felt important to him because we were important to him. He cared. He really bloody cared and we really bloody mattered to him.

I don’t want to paint him as an angel and I don’t want to paint him as a saint. That was perhaps the greatest part of it, the fact that he wasn’t an angel and he wasn’t a saint. He was a man. In person, he was earthy and mischievous and sometimes downright naughty. In our times together he said things that I would never repeat but which made me slap my thigh at the wonderful ‘incorrectness’ of them. I’ll sum it up as we do in these parts and I really mean this too… Simon was Great Crack. And in case you feel like correcting me and telling me that word I’m searching for is actually ‘Craic’ then, sorry, ‘Craic’ is for the tourists; in these here parts, we call it Crack.

Gibbzer was a great friend too and when those two found each other, it was such a delight to see. It’s not for me to type here how I know he felt about her but I know it and I’m positive she knows it too. They had a marvellous adventure in their too-brief time together and they travelled the hard road together too. They were each other’s prize.

Simon is gone today and I can only begin to guess how I will miss knowing he is out there. Sometimes he would message me, offering some private counterpoint to whatever was currently happening in the public online domain. I wish he would do that now, to tell me that what I’m seeing is not really true, but I know that is not to be. People who don’t know about online stuff think that it’s not really real but it is. It is all too real.

I think Simon has left me some important lessons about living. About owning the good things and also the bad things that get thrown at you. He’s taught me a little about dying too, I reckon, that you can bring people along with you quite a long way, until you can bring them no further.

The final lesson, though, is about social media and maybe that is as it should be.

All the Twitters and Facebooks and such are damaged goods now. They are not what they were and they never will be again. But we can still use them. Simon showed me how his social media became his bionic arm. Even as his body failed him, he utilised his social media so that he remained strong and sharp and witty and loving right up to the final moments of his life.

He used it to finish strong.

And he did, he finished strong.

He never shirked from his illness and the trials and tribulations that it brought along with it. He told it like it was. But he played the game, the game never played him. He never lost his empathy, his strength, his humour, not in this public arena, not for a moment.

And we will remember him this way. We will remember him as a beacon for what was best in all the myriad of online relationships that we weave. A force for warmth and truth in the world. A good man to know.

And me?

I will also be able to remember the bloke who waited outside the library for me though I was a little late and who smiled at me when I crossed the road to greet him.

And how I smiled back.