Ellory. Hackney. July 19.
It was unbearably hot, so I got out of the flat to spend a third-world weekly food allowance on an iced-coffee and a croissant. Walking down Mare Street I spotted a spacious, modern establishment with doors wide-open that seemed to scream ‘open’. And they were.
Ellory is an Instagrammer’s wet-dream, everything perfectly off-white and pearl-hued. It is also the surname of someone at my secondary school who used to smell, and we used to spray him with deodorant, directly into his face. Walking across the threshold is like pulling a filter over your eyes; marbled tops, treated wood, cacti and potted plants of various design adorning each of the square-cut tables. Ordering food felt like it would ruin the scene.
The barista looked like a cross between Jared Leto and some other celebrity who I can’t remember. When he finally spotted me lurking on the end of the bar his expression betrayed some personal discomfort, perhaps best described as looking though he had a monkey-nut half-way inserted into his rectum and any sudden movements might shatter the casing, causing an inevitable tearing of the colon-wall, internal bleeding and worst of all, an embarrassing conversation with the doctor. It was amazing he got anything done at all with that weight on his mind. I asked him if he was OK and he nodded, carefully. I ordered an iced-coffee and when he asked me what type I was caught off guard- I had no idea the variations of regular coffee applied to the iced-coffee world. I panicked and said ‘cold’. He looked at me in the same way independent bookstore clerks do, when, instead of ordering in a book they don’t have, I tell them I’ll just get it off Amazon.
My drink came whilst I was eavesdropping on a cryptic, management-speak conversation about ‘big changes’, ‘I can’t say much’, ‘there will be pain’, ‘should be exciting’. Before I knew it I had sucked up the entire thing in 4 sips, and found myself awkwardly perched at the bar with no real reason to remain there. I ordered a tap water and he forgot to bring it. Not wanting to sound cheap by asking where it was, I grasped my ex-coffee to conceal its emptiness, waited for the ice to melt, and then drank it. I watched the barista pull out a bag of coffee labelled ‘Dark Arts Roast’. Fitting, I thought, as only some kind of black magic wizardry can turn a bag of cheap beans into a very heavy bag of money. It was an illusion in which we are all complicit; stage-hands, trusted assistants.
Behind me, some ‘creatives’ were having a working-lunch — ‘creatives’ being those that don’t wear suits to work and whose GCSE grades never surpassed a ‘B’ — ‘working lunch’ being a genius invention used under tyrannical, tech start-up dictatorships, to contravene employment legislation protecting their workers. But they didn’t seem to mind a little violation of their human rights as long as they got a free lunch. And it did look exceptionally tasty. They had cleverly installed a separate bank near the bar, away from the restaurant, for day-dwelling, mac-wielding, WIFI-pirating freelancers which kept them from commandeering invaluable table space from those willing to spend more than the price of an espresso. They crammed in like battery hens. It was the equivalent of social housing under the welfare state — moving the lowest contributors of society into a small, overpopulated, distinct area away from the well-off. Tensions rose after one of them wanted to charge his laptop, a request that fell on the deaf ears of the current occupants of the three precious sockets. It was the principle of scarcity of resources, a common source of conflict in underprivileged areas.
Sitting on the otherwise empty row of stools, nursing my drink, I felt like I was in a horribly bourgeois re-enactment of the common ‘drunken low-life and solitary bartender at a mid-western dive bar’ scene. Except my biggest problems were nuisance phone calls from PPI agents and my only unshakeable addiction was looking at my reflection in any mirrored surface that I walked past. I mourned my lack of serious personal conundrums which were no doubt completely necessary for depth of character. I dreamt of war-time, a much simpler time. Back then, all that mattered was surviving, and looking bloody good whilst you were doing it. How can people in today’s world ever have a purpose that transcends imminent survival? When did people stop wearing hats every day like they used to? No wonder we are all shivering, anxious wrecks — we have no purpose, and no hats. I needed a little danger, but from where?
The barista finished washing an empty glass and coolly slid a tray of monkey nuts over to me with a smile. One of them was slightly darker than the rest.
