Why Does it Always Claude Rains On Me?

Its happened again. I went to a cafe, I ordered a coffee, I paid and they said "Thank you, sir. We'll get that over to you" and I sat there for ten minutes and had to return to the counter again and order it again. I'll name names: it was the MAC, but it needn't have been - this happens other places as well. I don't really understand it: I have sticky up white hair, heavily framed black glasses and pink shoes. Also, where I live, I have a foreign accent. I'd remember me! But other people don't, busy people working in cafes especially. To them I disappear like steam off a kettle as soon as they've taken my money.

"How can they have forgotten me? I'm wearing a pocket-blocker!"

The women in front of me had the right idea. Their order was a full blown performance and took a full five minutes of inventive business. There was back and forth comedy patter, scanning the menus in real time, scooting off to find a table mid-order, bringing in the waiter to advise on the specials, and then as a piece de resistance, some confounding stuff about a credit card that was both out of date and in date, and a slight kerfuffle about whether it was still working. It was the best bit of theatre I'd seen in the MAC in a long while. My purchase of a latte with the correct money after all that was like a shrew's fart after Krakatoa.

I used to write in cafes all the time. I liked to be out of the house, among people. I like the buzz, the clanging of the coffee machines, the squeak of chair-stoppers on wood laminate. The seismic shock of a dropped fork. But not anymore. Town is a long way to go to be ignored. I've learned to write in the house. And when I make a coffee I remember who it is for.