I can't take my coffee

Recently I had occasion to walk through the city early, just as her jaw was stretching, yawning the way into morning. The lights on the normally gaudy pier were off and I was strangely touched by this sleeping monster stretching out to sea - it was as if a sweet smile on his horrific face placated even the tide. People everywhere were quietly scratching out their living in aesthetic Herculean fashion (Greece is the new Rome, darling) - none more so than the brightly jacketed ones who will sweep the milliard pebbles back to the beach all summer.

A friend is on the journey of her life, and I am with her as she sets foot outside the known into the arenas of her long dreams. I am at the station, the port; I am on the cliff, I board the boat. With her adventure, my feet remember that venturing alone into the new world and my brow resolves to follow that cloud of dream to the end again and again.

I walk through this end- of- the- line city that is even now embarking on its own bright adventure, standing at its own terminal; I walk through lanes of closed bookshops and clothes arcades, and sit amongst the magnificent steady, sweeping Victorian rhythms of the railway terminal and drink coffee to wake, and slowly, suddenly my heart feels like a large brown paper bag, held in the hand and crumpling in it - all seems beautiful and poignant and extraordinary, and so ordinary. And as the city wakes I know, with a quiet pride and a funny sense of embarassment, I just know I can't take my coffee.