Coffee Stitch

If I pick a moment to savour it's often coffee. There are other things, other colours, textures, scents, flavours, sounds that draw emotive pictures all over every level of my brain and soul. But often, it's coffee.

This morning somehow the flask, the dinky pink crackled flask brimming with cold perky coffee for optimum morning alertness, is left on the kitchen worktop.

Thoughts of it standing by the red plastic kettle and the crumby white toaster, waiting, have to suffice.

In the supermarket there is something I am supposed to buy yet forget: the lure of bargains, perhaps the thought of biscuit dunked, the classic bitter sweet: anyway, the self-serve checkout beeps through two organic chocolatey packets: it fritters away a mere pound sterling.

At home, an old friend arrives, all the way from France, unexpected: how lovely then, to have biscuits!

And post arrives, in a box.

A box of Vietnamese coffee.

A thick brew at lunchtime accompanies a retrospective: though our caller prefers tea: all the things that once were and how they move on and what is important and how splendid if we could reciprocate the visit and there isn't much we lack but more travel, how we would like that. How we have liked where we have been: crossing the road in Hanoi: we mime it for him: the diminutive lady, white haired, leading us through the moped sea.

We wave him goodbye; in his hired car; send him with fine wishes.

It is not, I think, that the coffee is better than anything else, but that it represents the moments where I stitch all these pictures together.