It is filthy and relentless in the cafe. It is filthy and relentless outside it too.

Service in London is filled with rats and hustlers and artists. Burrowing through the city fighting for scraps and running past each other without pausing to look up.

Head down and scrub and write. 

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It is filthy and dirty and I am settled into a Saturday shift. I am new to London and even newer to the job so have settled towards the bottom end of an unofficial hierarchy. Sometimes allowed to run food, sometimes allowed to take orders, occasionally I get to make coffee. Mainly, I clear plates and polish cutlery.

The water is so hard here. in Ireland, you only need to look at the water and it lathers. The people are hard here too and do not feel the need to apologise profusely while placing an order. They do not lather in conversation, their words are coated in limescale, making it difficult to perceive anything.

 

I scrub until my hands are cracked and scaled and stinging from the soap and vinegar used to polish the silverware. I keep my head down and listen, ready to hear the right customer talk about the right thing. The ultimate hustle - the coveted right-place-right-time mindset that goaded me all the way to London in the first place.

 

There are 4 hours left in my shift, and I have just been given out to for changing the music to ‘Rum, Sodomy & the Lash’ for the third time (Shane MacGowen has just died and people are still ordering poached eggs and salmon).

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 “at least listen to this song, this one is actually really nice”

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I plea, full of desperation and Neurofen, to the head barista while deftly exiting the ‘Coffee Shop Chill’ playlist  to put on ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’. People here don’t know how many times I played that song this summer in pubs to afford to come to London in the first place, they don’t know how many sessions I played it at - the chorus never failing to fill me with ecstasy, they don’t know the Pogues and the annual festive argument about whether or not the F-word belongs on national radio. They don’t know of the lathering! 

 

But, against all odds! They let me play the song, the whole song, the whole way through. In a cafe on Primrose Hill, I hear Mossy Ryans and Naoise May chewing out the lyrics, I see bar stools and sitting room couches packed with friends all listening, blood in their cheeks from the heat of it all. Half-drunk pints, torn-up beer mats, cups of tea, a demolished packet of digestives. I hear all of my friends joining in for the chorus while I nearly fall off my stool playing the fiddle - a piece of rosin being passed across the table. 

It is filthy and dirty in London but it was filthy and dirty in Dublin too, and that was the best thing about it.