The French Cafe

On Friday evenings around 7:30 PM, if I have put in a solid day's work, I shut my laptop and do an energetic happy dance. One of the many wonderful things about full-time, Monday to Friday work is that there really is such a thing as a weekend. Saturday is no longer just Tuesday with bigger crowds.

That said, there is a surprisingly large number of tourists around. Benedict Ambrose says that this is to be expected, and I suppose it is, now that we are no longer off the beaten tourist trail. Although not actually at the Heart of Midlothian, I could stroll over and spit on it on my lunch break.

My circadian rhythms are still off-beat, so I slept very late, ruining the best part of the day. It wasn't until eleven o'clock that B.A. and I stepped out into the pouring rain and hurried to the French cafe. This was the third morning in a row that we went to that cafe, and once again it was full of foreigners. This time there were as many Italians as French-speakers. I suspect the cafe may have featured in a continental tourist guide under the chapter heading: "British Food: How to Stay Safe."

As a matter of fact, the British have learned a thing or two about cooking since Elizabeth David first set pen to olive oil-stained paper, but continentals have a hard time believing that. This may be because they have made the mistake of eating "croissants" at Costa or Caffe Nero or sampled the meatish pies steaming under the lights at Gregg's.  I would have to be very hungry indeed before I ate any standard High Street offering, and our new cafe is one of the only three Edinburgh places I would buy a croissant with any sense of joy and anticipation.

Even Brew Lab does not offer a good croissant; it is to weep.

Fortunately, the French cafe is even closer than Brew Lab, thanks to our urban exile. After our brunch and exploratory rummage in the Walker Slater outlet, we climbed our narrow winding staircase and settled down for a restful day of reading and study.

Study meant making up 70 flashcards of Polish vocabulary so basic, you would think I would have it perfectly hammered into my head by now, ready to spring forward for easy use as soon as it is required: words like the genitive form of "Edynburg" and the instrumental form of "week" and the adjectives "north", "south", "east" and "west" with their masculine, feminine and neuter endings.

Reading meant Tim Clare's  We Can't All Be Astronauts (2009), which I found in the cognitive neuroscience shelf at Central Library yesterday. Presumably it was supposed to be in "self-help" despite the tiny label at the bottom of the back cover pronouncing it to be "memoir."

It is quite a good book despite consisting of 300 pages of a millennial class traitor (male) hating himself, his friends and the universe because his Creative Writing class friends have all got great book deals and he doesn't.  (We know he's a class traitor because he mentions his roots in an apologetic way at least twice and denounces his hometown in colourfully scornful terms. He seems to be one of those formerly working-class kids who goes to uni and then alienates all his old friends and relations by asking them what they think of Japanese cinema and by saying "dinner" instead of "tea.")

What makes it a good book is that Clare employs an excellent technique for story-writing, and it is to figure out what one's hero wants more than anything in the world and then to prevent him from getting it.

Also, Clare is so abjectly miserable--and his friends so enormously successful--that I really did feel sorry for him and forgot that he had clearly got his book deal in the end. In addition, when I reflected that it had been a long time since I myself had got any fiction published, I felt very lucky that I actually do write for a living.

The best news story I wrote all week--as far as I can remember--was this one, and I'm glad I spent so much of Friday on it because it is the story of a woman who objects to the racist anti-racist campaign in her child's and grandchildren's school district. Unlike the CBC, it seems, I thought to ask her what her family background was and whether she or her family has experienced racism herself or themselves. Yes, she has, and yes, they have. The heroine of my story is a living, breathing anti-racism poster in herself, and I'd like to shake her hand. I was very pleased to be able to tell her that Jordan Peterson had tweeted in support of her concerns.

Alas that my story is not in the Top Five, but if you look at the Top Five, you will see why.

Incidentally, while I read Tim Clare's self-description of himself in stained shorts playing video games, I felt that he would have profited from a few Jordan Peterson videos, only I don't remember if there was youtube in 2007. One of the problems of our lifetime is that everything changes so rapidly, I can't remember what technology we had from year to year. We definitely had blogs in 2006, and I had work published online on a friend's online journal between 2002 and 2005. I didn't have a mobile phone before 2008, but other people did. My dad brought home a Commodore 64 in the 1980s and thanks to his work we had very early internet access, but I  typed my undergrad papers on my dear old electric typewriter until.... hmm....

This technological amnesia became an issue last night as we watched a made-for-Netflix drama about the Unabomber. I couldn't believe the computers were so clunky in 1995, or that they still had green cursors and letters. But now I am becoming completely off-topic. Suffice it to say that we are doing well, have access to superlative architecture, good coffee, excellent croissants, library books, wi-fi and Netflix.