What a weird day I had yesterday. It began with a three-hour beginners’ Barista training. For those who don’t know, a barista is someone who’s an expert coffee maker - allegedly your guy or gal behind the counter at Starbucks. This is not because I have found my vocation, but because I am fairly fanatical about coffee and was given the course as a birthday present (last June - it’s taken a while). A man who looked more like a barman than a barista regaled us with stories of caffeined-up goats and coffee wars before teaching us the intricacies of the grind versus the tamp versus the humidity. Did you know, by the way, that there are very serious, world barista championships? Seven of us sat on high, uncomfortable stools sipping samples till our hands shook. At the end we had a questionnaire and the only one that got me was the difference between a latte and a macchiato. Do you know? It was all a lot of fun and now I have to go out and buy my own grinder. Because, babes, it’s all in the grind.

 

The evening was a different matter - from the ridiculous to the sublime: ‘Fragments’ - five short plays by Samuel Beckett at the Old Vic. Absolutely riveting, mind-blowing theatre. Peter Brook directs, and Kathryn Hunter is one of three brilliant actors in the empty space. They inhabit their characters with such total commitment, the language is poetry, the movement is precise, fluid and beautiful. Makes you realise how mediocre most theatre is.

 

Beckett attacks you with the full force of your own mortality. But he also makes you laugh. You can’t help falling right under his spell. Because, babes, it’s all in the grind. The man was a genius. (I believe I am not hte first to say that, but I think you need to be ‘a certain age’ to really get to grips with Beckett)

 

Meanwhile, just putting the finishing touches to my pamphlet ‘Rock’n’Roll Mamma’ and doing the last bits of writing and editing for Magma 42. I can see the light at the end of the editing tunnel and I hope my muse has not deserted me in disgust ...