We went to the same cafe almost every day during our month-long trip to Venice. It was the same one as on my last trip, its windows stuffed full of dry-looking biscuits, slices of Barbie-pink nougat and souvenir tins with Rialto views, while pigeons milled around the door as if daring each other to enter. Inside, there was a display case of pastries, a shelf of never-touched aperitifs and an overworked coffee machine behind a high counter. It’s always packed: pensioners, dog walkers, office workers, the postwoman, dithering tourists and the bravest pigeons, cruising for crumbs.
I recognised the staff though obviously they didn’t recognise me, what with 2.1 million tourists trudging past every year. But gradually we infiltrated the morning ecosystem and, after 10 days, the tall guy who operated the machine started saying: “Normale e lungo?” when we reached the front of the coffee crush. In week three, one particularly busy morning, he caught my eye as I queued and gesticulated at our already-made coffees, waiting on the counter. Cutting through to claim them, I felt like, I don’t know, George Clooney? Or at least a pigeon with recognisable markings that they don’t bother kicking out. It was a special moment: the gift of a brief sense of belonging.
It made me consider my feelings about the “being a regular” experience back home, which are historically ambivalent. I crave connection in my life of solitary screen staring, and brief chats when I visit my habitual haunts usually feel like bright, tiny gifts. Research shows that weak ties – our bonds with the people we see and interact with minimally – make us happier. But there are days when everything in my life is a bin fire, I’m spotty, unshowered and sulky; when I need cake but can’t face pleasantries. Other times, there’s nothing even wrong – I’m just inhabited by a mutinous, slightly adolescent, desire not to be known. There was a lovely piece in the New York Times last year about becoming a regular as an antidote to loneliness, but one line about the author’s ice-cream parlour hang-out froze my blood: “He tossed his broom aside and sat down across from me to ask what I was writing.” Argh! Flee!
It’s not that I believe a few minutes’ boring chat with me is any kind of prize to bestow or withhold. It’s more that I sometimes get a panicky sense that both parties are becoming tangled in an inescapable web of social obligation. I don’t think I’m alone in occasionally experiencing a sort of vertigo when weak ties threaten to become stronger. Isn’t there a very British urban horror story about a familiar stranger you’ve exchanged nods with for years on your commute one day striking up a conversation, which means you then have to get up an hour earlier to avoid them? We move to big cities to keep our ties weaker than water, to reinvent ourselves without anyone saying: “Oh, you drink macchiatos now?” or: “You’re looking nice today!” The fact that 50 pubs a month closed in the first half of this year in England and Wales suggests there are fewer of us in the market for a place where everybody knows your name.
But I think, gradually, I’m shedding my ambivalence. Moving back to my home town was a sort of acceptance of the mixed blessing of being known, because you’re a regular everywhere if you live somewhere small enough. Being here has helped me appreciate frequent connection more – the joy of places where everyone knows your order, at least. Yes, that means also accepting being known as utterly predictable, cake-dependent, often inarticulate and unwashed, and having the odd chat when you’re least in the mood for one. But I’ve started to understand that being caught – held, actually – in a web of inescapable social obligation is life.
In Venice, it was me who tried to strengthen the weak tie: on my birthday, I announced I was “cinquanta oggi” (50 today) and the cafe staff congratulated me with polite bafflement, then ignored me entirely. For the rest of the trip they talked to me about nothing but coffee and payment, because I’m not really a regular there. But I am here, and that’s rather nice.
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