People-watching

As everybody knows, what I enjoy above all things is people-watching wherever I am.  And today, over my morning cup of tea and toast in a local café, I became fascinated by another illustration of the oddities of human behaviour and how everything we do reveals something about ourselves and the elements which direct our lives.

The café was only half-full, with many of its small tables unoccupied, providing plenty of choice for newcomers. It had a counter with six stools, two tables for four people and six tables for two people.  I started to notice that the abundance of choice itself was proving problematic to some people as they came in.  If only one table had been unoccupied, I realised the choice of where to sit would have been simple, because it would have made itself.  Here, though, the possibility of many different choices presented itself.  A woman came in, and I watched as she looked round, hesitated for quite a time, and then started to move round a few tables.  Eventually she settled herself down at a table next to one of the occupied tables.  It looked as though she was trying to draw herself as close as she could to another group of people, without actually joining them at their table.

I contrasted this with my own choice of seating a few minutes earlier.  Here I had quickly checked all the tables as I came in, trying to find one that was evenly spaced between the occupied tables, and had felt myself fortunate to find just what I like, which is always having some space between me and other people.  I realised I would certainly not have sat myself down next to somebody on the next table, as she had done, if there had been more room elsewhere.  I had deliberately chosen to distance myself as far as possible from my fellow guests.  Not only was I trying to distance myself but I was also attempting to do this in, to me, the most physically harmonious way possible, for I had chosen a table which positioned me carefully at equal distances from each of two other occupied tables, with an unoccupied table on either side, creating a kind of a pattern.  (The Small Intestine likes to put things in order and sees things in terms of patterns wherever possible.)

The next person who came in now had less choice, but still hesitated, first looking at the long counter, but then deciding to sit at a table, and again taking a little time to choose at which table to sit.  The man following her, however, plonked himself down at the counter without looking round at all, even though the counter was close to the now mainly occupied tables, and there was plenty of space elsewhere.  So obviously, unlike me, he didn’t mind being pushed up close to other people, and hardly seemed to notice his surroundings.

This reminded me of the cartoon of a theatre audience with only two couples attending, in which the couples seat themselves one behind the other, with the whole of the rest of the auditorium completely empty, and the woman in the row behind asks the woman in front to take off her hat, as she can’t see the stage.  I always think of this cartoon when I go to my newly-opened local cinema, and find myself each time in a fairly empty auditorium, and each time annoy myself by not being able to decide where to sit, because there is so much choice.  The same is obviously true for many people, as I see my fellow cinema attendees hesitating for quite a long time before deciding in which of the many empty rows of seats and the many empty seats in these rows to sit.

Of course, being me, I had to try to relate this behaviour to the different elements, starting with my own. Is it typical of Fire to be as cautious as to where it positions itself in relation to other people as I am?  I am very aware of how close other people get to me and realise that I welcome approaches from people I accept as being safe to be with (my Heart Protector working actively here), but am very hesitant to allow the kind of close contact enjoyed by those who welcome group hugs, a very Earth element pleasure, I think.

The young woman who sat herself down so close to another group may well have been Earth, or at least had strong Earth qualities, needing the closeness of others around her.  Water, too, though, is in need of the company of others, but in a slightly different way, and this woman did not show the kind of hesitation I think I would have expected of Water, a hesitation combined with that quick glance round to check what is going on around it, and ensure that no danger lurks.  This is often Water’s way as it enters a new space, and one which can therefore potentially represent a risk.  I was a little more unsure how Wood would seat itself, but I think it would undoubtedly be less concerned with who the people were it was sitting itself amongst than either I would be or the woman who came into the café after me.

And what about Metal, then?  Here I am even more unsure.  I feel it would certainly slip in more quietly and unobtrusively, as the man who settled himself down quickly did, for this is the element with the lightest tread of all, but would it look around and seek to position itself in a specific relation to other customers, or simply ignore them?  I decided that I must ask my Metal friends about this.

This is how this morning’s breakfast gave me another lesson in the elements.

Discovery of a little gem of a cake shop behind Oxford Street

One of the delights of London is how many coffee shops there are, and how often I have managed to find a new one.  As everybody who reads my blog knows, it is in coffee-shops that I do most of my writing.  To think my thoughts I need the peace of being in my own little world, with no distractions of phone or email to disturb me.  If the music is too loud, which unfortunately it often is now, one of the benefits of being hard of hearing and having to wear hearing-aids is that at a turn of a little switch I can shut all sound away, and stay cocooned in blissful silence for as long as I want.

So today I found yet another little coffee shop, or more correctly a little cake shop.  It is called The Sicilian Collection, and is at 51-51A Cleveland Street, London W1T 4JH, email info@strazzanti.co. 

It is run by a young Sicilian woman, Emilia Strazzanti, who has been trained in cake-making by a five-star Michelin chef.  Her beautiful cakes are certainly proof of that.  I have rarely tasted cakes which are so light to the palette, rich in taste and utterly fresh. 

At the moment the shop is tiny, with just room for a couple of people to sit inside and drink her delicious, freshly made coffee and eat a slice of her cake, and with a bench outside for when the weather gets warmer.  She told me, however, that she will soon be extending the shop to the back of the premises, where there will be tables for lunch as well as coffee and cakes.

After enjoying two cups of excellent coffee with a slice of one of her cakes, I asked for a selection of three different cakes to take away as a treat for myself.  Emilia told me they were slices of:
 

1.      A Sicilian hazelnut and chocolate cake, made from hazelnuts from the north of Catania

2.      A Sicilian pistachio and lemon cake with crema di pistachio from Bronte

3.      A Sicilian almond cake with almonds from Val di Noto

 

I left her little shop with a smile on my face.

Another chance encounter

Readers of this blog know that I enjoy going to coffee houses and doing my writing and my reading over coffee.  Often, too, I don’t finish the cup, but just enjoy the smell and the feeling of excitement it always give me.  I have traced this back to when I was a teenager, and the first coffee shop in London opened in Wigmore Street.  This would be where I rendezvoused with an uncle who, being originally from Austria, was helping me with my German studies as I prepared for my university entrance exams.  Then a second coffee-shop opened in Hampstead, and again I can feel the thrill of travelling up to North London from our South London home, emerging in Hampstead High Street opposite the Everyman Cinema, and feeling myself in the heart of London’s intellectual life.  A coffee shop, a book, and something to write with and write on therefore still remain tinged for me with the exciting aura of the past. 

And I would like now to acknowledge the friendliness of all the staff at one of my favourite coffee houses, Paul’s, here in Marylebone High Street.  I now know each by name, and they always greet me with warmth.  And, too, to my surprise, I discovered recently through a chance encounter that two people who are often here at the same time as me happen to have known this same uncle who introduced me to coffee houses all those years back.  This is another example of what is called a serendipity – something that happens quite by chance, but seems somehow to be pre-ordained.

I love the word serendipity*.  Firstly, for its sound which has within it a clear reference to a kind of made-up childish word I use, “dippity”, which is in not in my dictionary, (although “dippy”” is, meaning “crazy” or “silly”, and” of uncertain 20^th C origin”), and for me describes a somewhat scatty kind of a person.  And this always sets me thinking on a well-worn, nostalgic path which leads directly to my mother.  For I remember her well one day, a few years after I had established my acupuncture college, saying to me, “I always wonder how a flibbertigibbet like you got it together to run a school.”  So to her all the length of the half-century of the lives we lived together I must have remained this very scatty, dippity sort of person I certainly was as a child.

The thought of this serendipitous meeting with my uncle’s acquaintances in my favourite coffee shop this morning brought this all back to me.

* The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “serendipity” as ”the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident” (coined by Horace Walpole in 1854)

Two laments for the end of an era and one happy thing

I start this blog with my laments.  The little café, Stefano’s, which I would pop into daily on my way to the clinic, and which I wrote about in my blog of 29^th March, has now closed and been taken over by what looks like a very much more upmarket place.  I think I can no longer call it a café, but would describe it more as a small patisserie.  And my favourite espresso has nearly doubled in price.  Stefano and his Italian family seem to have been the last survivors around here of a time when small family-owned businesses ran a one-shop enterprise.  Now the coffee chains, such as Starbucks, with their standardized fare, are taking over everywhere, perhaps understandably in view of the rents charged.  Even this new little patisserie has other branches elsewhere in the up-and-coming areas of London.

My second lament is for the puzzling substitution in train announcements of the good old-fashioned word “passenger” by the word “customer”.  I wonder who decided that this change was necessary.  Did a group of railway executives with nothing better to do solemnly sit around a table to discuss the merits of the one word against the other?  And why change it at all?  When I hear “passengers” I always thrill slightly to the thought of all those large ocean liners, like the Queen Mary, or indeed the Titanic, or people climbing aboard The Great Western  or the Orient Express.  When discussing the Titanic disaster, is anybody likely to ask, “How many customers were lost?”  The word now only reminds me of the money I paid today for my rail ticket to a much less exotic destination, Sussex.

But to relieve the slight gloom of writing about these two rather sad things, I tried to think of something good that has happened to me, and came up with quite a few examples, none more heartwarming than a little incident that occurred in the street a few days ago.  There was a different Big Issue seller from the usual one outside my local supermarket, and I thought I recognized him from seeing him somewhere else.  He smiled at me, and said, “You may not remember me, but you’re the lady who called to me to come across the street in Bond Street some time ago, so that you could buy a copy from me.”  Now I recalled that this must have been over a year ago.  So he had remembered this small act of kindness from all those months back.  Perhaps too many people treat Big Issue sellers as nuisances, and walk on by, and too few as people, trying hard to put their lives together.  We smiled at each other like old friends, and I walked on with my heart a little warmer. 

Stefano's Snack Bar

Anybody who knows anything about me knows that I do a lot of my thinking and writing in coffee bars around London.  There is one in particular that I now treat as a kind of home from home, and I want to write about it because it is nearly the last of its kind in central London.  It is called Stefano’s Snack Bar and is at 56 New Cavendish Street, W1, half-way between Marylebone High Street and Portland Place.

It is run by an Italian family, father, mother and son, Stefano himself being the son, with Giorgio and Santina his parents.  I like going in there for many reasons.  First, because of the very warm welcome I always receive, a refreshing change from the more impersonal or even non-existent greetings in those anonymous coffee shop chains now filling up every London street.

Then I particularly love the homemade chocolate slices which Giorgio makes, sometimes, I think, specially for me, or by the tray-load for any seminars we run from our Harley Street clinic just round the corner.  And finally, they have the cheapest and best espresso coffee in London, a great temptation for me as I pass them at least once or twice a day on my way from my flat to the clinic.

If you are in the area and want to stop for a cup of coffee, do pop in and tell them that Nora has sent you.  They will give you a special welcome.

 

The delight of reading a good book

I have just come back from spending a happy half-hour in one of my favourite coffee shops reading a book, and, luckily, a good book, too.  As I walked back home I pondered on what it is about the writing of a book which turns its words into something so meaningful that they can make me forget where I am, and can feel myself transported to some hidden place within me which nourishes my deepest feelings.


In my university days, I did a lot of thinking and writing about just this – what makes one book an accumulation of clichés which teach me nothing new about life, and another, as this book today did, helps me to a greater understanding of the mysteries of life?  Perhaps the nearest we can get to an answer is by saying that in some way what is written expresses something which we regard as universally true about the human condition.  Each new thought then adds something to our understanding of human beings.


So my brief half-hour in the company of a German writer, Martin Suter, who I have just been introduced to, has made me see the world with slightly different eyes, subtly shifting my perspective.  And the same is also, of course, true of creative painters, sculptors, playwrights or poets.  Or even, as happened yesterday, of film directors, as I watched a film I had seen before, Strictly Ballroom, but for the first time on a large cinema screen with a roomful of people all as entranced as I was, entranced enough to burst into applause as the lights went up at the end.


How many new insights into life those with creative eyes continue to reveal to us!  And the more I understand about human life, the more this feeds into my work as acupuncturist with my patients.  So although some people may think that my half-hour this morning reading over my cup of coffee might seem to be just wasting time, I see it as something quite different – as helping to satisfy my curiosity about the nature of things.

The end of self-publishing my books is now in sight!

I am having an interesting and challenging time at the moment re-reading my four books with a completely fresh eye.

It is more than 10 years since I wrote the Simple Guide, 9 years since my Handbook appeared, 7 years since the Keepers of the Soul and 4 years since I followed this up with the Pattern of Things.  And now there is my fifth publication, the Teach Yourself Five Element Acupuncture for Acupuncturists, which is hovering out there, so far unattached and unpublished in an English edition, but already photocopied in its Mandarin version for my Chinese students.

The reason for all this activity is because I have just signed with Singing Dragon Press for them to publish all my books (www.singingdragon.com).  I hesitated for a little while (but only a short while) before deciding, because I felt that I might to some extent lose the freedom I now have to do exactly what I want with my writing. But with some relief signed last week, persuaded, among other things, not only by the respect Jessica Kingsley, the publisher, has shown me, but, as she so succinctly said, the fact that I now no longer have to pack up and post my books myself!

In fact the feeling of freedom this signing has given me has been surprisingly releasing, as if a burden has been taken from me.  To my relief, only one of my books requires major re-editing, and that is the Handbook, and this is mainly because we are going to add my Teach Yourself Five Element Acupuncture to it as an appendix.  This has allowed me to look carefully at the whole structure of the book again, in particular re-writing the sections on point selection and, for good measure, adding a list of my favourite points.

When I have done this, I will have time to think ahead to what I want to write next.  Is it perhaps time to draw my blogs together into a book?

I hope, too, I will also soon have time to get down to doing something more frivolous, which is designing my long-announced, long-delayed coffee shop blog.  In the past two weeks I have found another café that I like and another one, which would be horrified to find itself called a café rather than a coffee-shop, that I disliked, so full was it of beautiful people in designer jeans and designer trainers and designer-looking faces.  It’s the little, unpretentious, privately-owned cafés that would never need to call themselves coffee-shops that I really like, and whose owners never fail to welcome me as a long-standing friend.