I admit I’ve had many café loves.
There’s been the sweetly fleeting. Once, an autumn morning in Rome, briefly at Barnum along Via Pellegrino. An August afternoon at Café Zinho in Amsterdam’s quiet Jordaan, with the freshest mint tea and Nina Simone.
And the seriously long-term. (Or as long- term as it can be for someone who’s moved cities every three, four years.) Lamingtons and lovely windows at Brighton’s Stoney Point where I finished editing
A writer’s café must have terrariums.
That much is decided.
How else to fill the long empty hours between chapters (sometimes paragraphs, nay sentences) when afflicted with the dreaded blank page syndrome. It isn’t that terrariums are endlessly fascinating — how exciting, after all, is a bowl stuffed with mud and succulents? — but they offer visual respite (“Look, tiny plant in a tiny world”) and room for dreaming. You are Frodo in miniature Middle Earth. Crusoe on a little isle. A modern-day Thumbelina. Gulliver in Lilliput. Alice in diminutive Wonderland.
A writer’s café must have good coffee. Served in a perpetually auto-refilling cup.
About this there is nothing more to be said.
And cake.
In particular, carrot cake. With cream cheese frosting that’s light yet luscious.
On some days, mawa cupcakes will also do.
On the shelf a handy selection of teas too, please. White, Lady Grey, Assam, lemongrass, genmaicha, Darjeeling.
Because you cannot live on coffee alone.
You can. But you must not. Because you will write quickly. In staccato. Short hyper sentences. Like this. See?
A small seasonal menu with food that’s magically non-soporific. No matter when you eat, and how much.
A writer’s café must be dotted with a cat or two.
Lap cats. Not ones that hiss and swipe at your ankles. Lovely lazy cats who will curl up on your keyboard and provide you the prefect excuse to not write.
Note: quite happy to accommodate friendly but Very Quiet dog.
A writer’s café must have a fireplace.
No matter if the temperature outside’s hovering around 48°C. A fireplace, even if unused, lends immense amounts of cosy character. It conjures Christmas, oranges, friendly chatter, mulled wine, chestnuts, fat novels, comfy cushions, socks.
Also useful to burn manuscripts, rejection letters, editors.
On the mantelpiece there’s place too for an old clock and books that spill over from the shelves.
Rows and rows of books to dip into, and borrow, and never return, and add to with your own. Well-thumbed paperbacks and un-dusty hard-bound tomes, and some books in languages you don’t understand, and books with pictures, and illustrations, and children’s books for quick flights of fancy. Also, a dictionary. And a thesaurus.
Windows with a view.
Of a street where people pass by, and you watch them wondering where they’re going, and who they are, and who they love. A street with not much traffic, but just enough bustle to keep things alive, and make you feel you are part of a city, a place, a pulsating network of anonymous yet intimate connections. A window also with a view. Of mountains. Or trees. Or a park with trees. Of something lush and green, and sprinkled with flowers, preferably, so that you can watch the seasons and notice them changing.
So that once in a while you are wonderstruck by the sudden fragrance of something sweet and white and wild.
A piano.
For someone (hopefully, competent) to play a chanson or two. And maybe on some evenings, you will walk away from your laptop and hit a tentative chord progression, a small ditty from the music lessons you took all the way back in school. You wish secretly you were a musician, rather than a writer, and touch the keys with longing, and you go back to your manuscript feeling a little happy, a little sad.
But for the days when there’s no one at the piano, there will be music.
Preferably no EDM. Or death metal. Or anything else that might sear your brain. Folk will do. Blue grass. Or some acoustic singer-songwriter material. Jazz. Jazz. Jazz. But all this at the right volume, soft enough to linger in the air and not infiltrate your words. An ideal playlist would include The Tallest Man on Earth, Bear’s Den, The XX, Tame Impala, The Lumineers, Alice Boman, The War on Drugs.
A writer’s café must have the right sort of light. Airy, Impressionistic light that shimmers, and is vast and wide and falls benevolently through the windows. And makes you wish you were a painter instead.
A well. Into which you throw pennies in return for (original) book ideas.
Chocolate.
Wide open spaces.
A balcony, or a garden. To take some air, smoke a cigarette, see the sky, pace nervously while awaiting publisher responses, hear the distant call for prayer, watch the birds, pace nervously some more.
In a corner, an opium den. For days when inspiration has dried up like a raisin in the sun. Or if you’re feeling particularly decadent and literary and de Quincy-ish. Here, you can dream crazy.
A secret bar. Stocking wine and beer from all around the world. Endlessly, magically replenished. And free.
A stress-relief corner. Preferably sound-proof. So you may rant and rage about so-and-so winning the Booker, and not you.
A wandering minstrel. With a guitar. Who strums and sings and asks you what you’re writing and what your book is about and says she understands when you can’t quite explain. Wall art. By some local struggling artist with whom you feel amiable kinship.
More chocolate.
A room in which it’s always night, and the ceiling is the sky littered with stars.
Janice Pariat is the author of the novel Seahorse; Tweet to her @janicepariat