The man on the laptop in Starbucks
The laptop sits, at a rakish angle, on the table. Its owner leans back nonchalantly clutching a book in such a way that the cover is obscured. Often, he doesn’t even seem to have a Starbucks’ trademark tipple to hand. But the man on the laptop in Starbucks looks so utterly at home he could be in his flat. His insouciant ease reminds me of the quip about the man who swallowed a teaspoon as a boy and hadn’t stirred since.
Standing in the queue while mothers afore and aft compare creams for rashes caused by silver jewellery, I notice he isn’t scanning his emails. Indeed, he rarely touches the keyboard. It’s as if the laptop is a symbolic accessory, proof that its owner is thrusting, dynamic and engaged in worthwhile intellectual pursuit. Which leads me to suspect, uncharitably, that the laptop is just a brilliant cover for sheer idleness and that its owner is a disciple of James Thurber (“It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all”).
In the US, the man on the laptop in Starbucks is an endangered species. Many of them are deemed to be in breach of what the Wall Street Journal calls – with zero irony intended – “coffee-shop etiquette”. The practice of using one reasonably expensive dose of caffeine as an alibi for two hours’ occupancy of a table and a power point has led to a backlash among café owners. Starbucks still officially welcome such customers, but they must now, apparently, endure ‘how dare you?’ glances from other irate drinkers. Fortunately, this backlash has yet to reach south west London.
The man on the laptop in Starbucks (which, despite all the liberal snobbishness, has improved the quality of British high street coffee by 1.7%) is nothing new. Even before laptops, some men – and I am convinced that, historically, it is usually men who do this – have always felt the mysterious need to go and sit somewhere in public.
When I was at sixth form in the Midlands in the 1970s, I learned to recognise the regular newspaper readers in the public library. A small middle-aged man with receding red hair, who looked rather like Lenin might had he had his charisma surgically removed (in other words very much like Robin Cook), semi-permanently occupied a seat by the window. There he pored over the Morning Star, the official organ of the British Communist Party, for such an extraordinary length of time it is a wonder the sheer dullness of the prose didn’t send him into a kind of stupor.
In the pub next door to Haymarket Network’s office, Morning Star man has a grey, reflective heir. This solitary gent nurses a half a pint of cooking lager while perusing the pub’s complementary newspapers so intently I wouldn’t be surprised to discover his life work is a thesis on the rise and fall of the British paper. Or maybe, like Robert Redford’s sleazy gambler in Havana (a tedious Casablanca retread that remains one of my favourite guilty pleasures) he is looking for the human interest stories – “identical twins, separated at birth, who meet 30 years later on a street corner, both married to someone called Shirley and smoking the same brand of cigarette”.
The simple (and slightly sexist) explanation for the profusion of Starbucks laptop man could be that when women want to kill time in public on their own they go shopping. Men, on the other hand, bring such quiet determination to the way they fill a chair, it’s as if they believe the Zen saying that when you are “sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes and the grass grows by itself”.
For the serious public sitter, the best advice is ditch the laptop, discard the cooking lager, and head to a Viennese coffee house. In the best of these establishments, the newspapers (so pristine they must have been recently ironed) are served with the kind of unfussy precision normally reserved for a Michelin-starred meal, the coffee is fresh and durable and time itself slows down to the stately pace of a Hapsburg ceremony.
T.S. Eliot’s tragicomic hero J. Alfred Prufrock would never have complained about measuring out his life in coffee spoons had he lived in Vienna.