Saturday 11th July

Yesterday, Friday was just another typical, untypical day.  It was cool first thing in the morning but the sun was blazing by ten.  The café was quite busy in the morning and as usual quiet after lunch.  Very few people walking around town as it got hotter and hotter.  I had the afternoon shift and a meeting with a lay preacher (don’t panic – I am not about to have a religious conversion) talking about the underused Protestant Temple, a few doors up from us, and the possibility of them running events some evenings in our Café.  Nothing really agreed, but quite nice people and they have to consult their hierarchy in the Church if England. A few customers and I closed up at five.

A quiet evening, we went to Bar Tortoni, where I had Calamari and Frites and my wife a salad, not forgetting a demi-litre of very good rose.  Most of our friends had agreed not to go to our usual Friday night at Le Pub Gambetta.  The musician was a French guy we had seen before.  And we were right.  We were only a few yards away and we could hear him clearly as he mauled ‘Bird on the wire’ by Leonard Cohen.  Hard to imagine anyone completely ruining the song but he managed it.  He sung a strange melody and put the emphasis on the wrong words, there was no phrasing, no sense of emotion in the flat baritone he monotonously bellowed out.  Third song was ‘Blowin in the Wind’ by Dylan and it was only by unpicking the words from the terrible melody that I worked out what he was singing.  We soon left and had another drink outside Café de Paris.  It was still hot at ten at night and we decided to call it a day.  Every day is different, every day is the same.  And even when you do nothing really it is quite lovely.