The Price of Being There

I paid £9.50 this morning for two newspapers and a small cup of coffee, only to discover that the most interesting story in the café wasn’t in either of the newspapers I’d bought.

I’d walked into town because I’d been cooped up in the house all week and wanted to get out into the world. Nothing particularly ambitious. I wanted to be around people, hear the noise of ordinary life, feel the movement of things happening outside my own head. The sort of thing I used to do regularly when I spent much of my time in cafés and coffeehouses, reading, writing, watching the world pass by.

There was a time when this was a relatively inexpensive way to spend a morning.

I remember buying The Times for £1.50 when I first came to England twenty-six years ago. Today, between The Times, The Guardian, and a small coffee, I’d parted with nearly ten pounds before I’d even found somewhere to sit.

Ten pounds!

I stood there briefly contemplating the economics of the whole business. If I did this every day, I’d spend nearly £3,500 a year. Meanwhile, my Apple One subscription gives me access to hundreds of newspapers and magazines, along with music, television, games, cloud storage, and goodness knows what else, for a fraction of the price.

I could read The Times on my iPad. Much of The Guardian is freely available online. I could walk across the road to the Co-op and buy an entire bag of coffee for something approaching the price of the small cup sitting in front of me.

The numbers weren’t adding up.

Of course, I could bring a thermos from home, find a park bench, open my iPad, and achieve much the same result without spending a penny beyond what I was already paying for my subscriptions.

But then I wouldn’t have been sitting in this particular café, at this particular moment, listening to three elderly women discussing the fate of a hedgehog.

And that, as it turns out, was the whole point.

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The café is small. There are four of us in the room: three elderly women sitting together at one table, and me at another. We’re close enough that I can hear their conversation almost as clearly as if I were sitting with them.

But here’s the beautiful thing.

I’m invisible.

Not literally, of course. I’m a reasonably substantial human being sitting at a table with two newspapers spread out in front of me. But socially, for all practical purposes, I don’t exist.

The women are talking as though they have the room to themselves. They aren’t performing for an audience. They aren’t monitoring their language or adjusting their conversation to accommodate the stranger sitting nearby.

They’re simply talking.

And I love this.

I’ve always enjoyed being the invisible observer. There’s a particular kind of freedom in being present without being required to participate. I don’t have to introduce myself, contribute an opinion, establish rapport, or become part of the social machinery of the encounter.

I can simply exist among other people.

Solitude without isolation.

Their conversation begins with grandchildren, old friends, gardening, and the birds that visit their gardens in winter. One woman mentions seeing a rat in her neighbour’s garden. He keeps chickens, which she suspects might explain the rat. She called out to warn him.

This immediately produces another rat story.

One of the other women had a rat in her loft.

“I don’t go in the loft,” she explains, before describing how she got somebody to come and deal with it.

The third woman has a rat story too. Her daughter had rats in the house.

And just like that, we’re in the rat chapter of the morning.

I find myself smiling into my coffee.

Nobody has decided to discuss rats. There’s no agenda, no moderator, no agreed destination. One woman mentions something, another recognises a connection, and a third retrieves a memory that might otherwise have remained undisturbed.

A story calls forth a story.

It occurs to me that this is what conversation looks like when it’s allowed to wander. Each contribution opens another possibility. The women are following associations rather than arguments, moving through a shared landscape of memory and experience.

And then, quite naturally, we arrive at hedgehogs.

One of the women has been feeding a hedgehog that visits her garden. She’s grown fond of the little creature, watching for it, making sure there’s food, becoming familiar with its appearances and habits.

But she hasn’t seen it recently.

The last time she saw it, it wasn’t looking well.

She rang the RSPCA for advice and was told to take it to a vet. So she found a box, gathered up the hedgehog, and carried it to the vets.

She waited with it for a while, but it was getting dark and she needed to get home. She left the little animal in the care of the vet.

A day passed without news.

Eventually, she telephoned. They told her the hedgehog had been put down. It had been having difficulty breathing. And now, sitting across from her friends with a cup of coffee, she’s wondering whether she did the right thing.

Perhaps she should have left it alone.

Perhaps it would have been better to let it die naturally in the garden.

There is a change in the emotional temperature of the conversation. The rat stories had carried an almost comic energy, each woman competing gently to contribute her own encounter with the unwanted visitors. But the hedgehog is different.

This is something she’s been carrying around.

A small uncertainty. A little pocket of regret.

Did I do the right thing?

I look down at my newspapers.

There are stories about the Chancellor and the possibility of higher taxes on banks in the forthcoming Budget. Another concerns Donald Trump and the proposed public broadcasting of a military execution. Elsewhere, European governments are negotiating the future of industrial policy and what should count as being made in Europe.

The machinery of civilisation grinding away.

Economics. Power. Punishment. Borders. The management of competing interests. The endless effort to impose some kind of order upon an uncertain world.

And three feet away, a woman is wondering whether she should have let a hedgehog die in her garden.

I find myself wondering which of these stories is more important.

Not in the sense that one ought to displace the other. I’m not suggesting that the fate of a garden hedgehog outweighs the economic decisions of governments or the exercise of state power.

But I am struck by the way the same fundamental questions seem to operate at different scales.

What are we responsible for? When should we intervene? How can we know whether our actions will produce the outcomes we intend? What do we owe the living things that share our world?

The woman acted out of compassion. She saw a creature in distress and tried to help. She couldn’t know what would happen next. She made a choice with the information available to her, and now she’s left to live with the consequences.

Much of human existence seems to consist of precisely this.

We act without certainty. We try to do the right thing. We discover that doing the right thing doesn’t necessarily produce a happy ending.

And then we tell the story to somebody who might understand.

Her friends listen.

One of them mentions that hedgehogs ought to be hibernating soon, but the changing climate is confusing the poor little animals.

And there it is.

The conversation has moved from a rat in somebody’s garden to the changing climate of the planet.

No hyperlink required.

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I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the nature of reading, writing, and the way our technologies shape our attention.

I love the digital world. I love hyperlinks and associative reading and the strange intellectual journeys that begin with one article and end, three hours later, somewhere entirely unexpected.

My own thinking tends to operate this way. An idea suggests another idea, which connects to something I read twenty years ago, which opens a door into a philosophical question, which reminds me of a conversation I once had, which leads me somewhere I hadn’t intended to go.

I’ve come to think of this as rhizomatic thinking.

No single centre. No predetermined route. Multiple entry points, multiple connections, the freedom to follow whatever thread happens to catch the imagination.

Digital reading is wonderfully suited to this kind of mind.

But there’s something about a physical newspaper that I’ve missed.

It has edges.

You open it at the beginning. You work your way through the pages. You encounter articles you might never have chosen to click on, stories placed beside other stories for reasons that may have more to do with editorial judgement and available space than your personal interests.

You can see where you are in the journey.

And eventually, you reach the end.

The newspaper is finished.

You fold it, put it down, and move on with your day.

The internet, by contrast, is never finished.

There’s always another article, another comment, another perspective, another argument, another breaking development. The experience is open-ended, which is precisely what makes it so seductive.

And exhausting.

An online newspaper doesn’t simply present the news. It offers opportunities to leave the story, pursue related material, enter debates, read reactions, check sources, and follow the conversation as it develops across social media.

The news becomes an environment rather than an object.

Sometimes that’s exactly what I want.

But other times I miss the satisfaction of having completed a journey.

Of reaching the last page.

Of knowing, at least for the moment, that I am done.

There’s an almost comic irony in my present circumstances. I’ve come into town partly because I miss reading physical newspapers, and I’ve barely managed to read a thing.

My attention has been captured by something far more immediate.

Three women talking.

And perhaps this is another kind of rhizomatic reading. Not following hyperlinks through a digital network, but following the living connections of human conversation as they unfold in real time.

Grandchildren become gardens. Gardens become birds. Birds become rats. Rats become hedgehogs. Hedgehogs become death. Death becomes regret. Regret becomes climate change.

An entire ecology of thought, unfolding over coffee.

Except this particular network doesn’t exist on a server.

It exists between three people who have lived long enough to accumulate a substantial collection of stories, and who have found an hour in which to share them.

When they leave the café, the conversation will disappear.

No transcript. No archive. No searchable database.

Unless, of course, there’s a wandering essayist sitting nearby with two largely unread newspapers.

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There’s another part of this experience that I don’t want to overlook.

My pleasure in remaining invisible.

It isn’t that I dislike people. Quite the opposite. I find them endlessly fascinating. I enjoy their stories, their contradictions, their peculiarities, the unexpected things they reveal about themselves through the ordinary business of conversation.

But I don’t always want to engage.

Sometimes I simply want to observe.

For much of my working life, I’ve been the person who has to enter the room and establish a connection. As a trainer, facilitator, and coach, my attention is directed outward in a deliberate way. I’m listening, interpreting, responding, asking questions, managing the energy of the encounter.

There’s a certain responsibility attached to being present in that capacity.

Here, in this little café, there’s no responsibility beyond the ordinary courtesies of sharing a public space.

Nobody needs anything from me.

Nobody expects me to contribute.

I can be alone without being lonely.

I wonder whether this is one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to coffeehouses, railway stations, city streets, and other spaces in which strangers briefly occupy one another’s worlds.

They offer a form of belonging that doesn’t require membership.

You can sit among people without becoming part of their story.

You can observe without needing to intervene.

You can be present without being central.

For someone who values both freedom and connection, it’s a rather agreeable arrangement.

And there’s something valuable about listening to ordinary life without trying to turn every encounter into an exchange.

Not everything needs to be a conversation I’m involved in.

Not every moment of proximity needs to become a relationship.

Sometimes the privilege is simply to witness.

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Of course, there’s still the matter of the £9.50.

I haven’t entirely abandoned my economic concerns.

I’m sitting here contemplating the absurdity of paying nearly ten pounds for something I could largely reproduce at home for next to nothing.

I could read the same newspapers on my iPad. I could brew a whole pot of coffee for the price of this small cup. I could sit at my kitchen table, warm and comfortable, with access to more information than any human being could reasonably hope to absorb in a lifetime.

From a purely economic perspective, staying home makes perfect sense.

But something would be missing.

The women wouldn’t be there.

Or rather, they would be somewhere, living their lives, discussing their grandchildren and rats and hedgehogs, but I wouldn’t know anything about it.

I’d have all the information in the world at my fingertips and no access to this particular moment of it.

And this brings me to a distinction I’ve been slowly coming to appreciate.

There’s a difference between being informed about the world and being in the world.

The first is increasingly inexpensive.

The second requires us to leave the house.

Not necessarily to spend money. That’s an important qualification. I don’t want to confuse participation in life with consumption.

I could have brought a thermos and sat on a park bench. I could have walked through town without buying anything. I could have spent the morning wandering the streets, watching people come and go, noticing the small dramas that unfold wherever human beings gather.

There are plenty of ways to be present that cost very little.

The problem is that we’ve become rather accustomed to organising our presence in the world around transactions.

We buy a coffee to justify sitting in a café. We pay for admission to enter certain spaces. We purchase experiences, book activities, subscribe to services, and increasingly measure the value of our time against the money we’ve spent.

But some of the most valuable things about being alive resist this kind of accounting.

A conversation overheard.

A chance encounter.

The movement of light across a building.

A familiar street looking unfamiliar because we’ve approached it from a different direction.

The pleasure of being among strangers without having to explain ourselves.

None of these things requires a purchase.

Although sometimes a purchase provides the excuse.

Perhaps that’s what my £9.50 bought me this morning.

An excuse to be somewhere else.

A little permission slip to leave the house and re-enter the world.

It was an expensive permission slip, admittedly.

I shall have to find cheaper ones.

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I’ve been trying to articulate what it means to be a philosophical correspondent and wandering essayist (more on this later).

The words appeal to me because they suggest a particular way of moving through life.

The correspondent goes out into the world and reports back. The essayist takes what he encounters and attempts to make sense of it, not necessarily by arriving at conclusions, but by following the questions wherever they lead.

And the wanderer makes himself available to what he hasn’t anticipated.

I think that last part is essential.

We live in a world increasingly organised around prediction, personalisation, and the elimination of uncertainty. Our digital environments learn what interests us and offer more of it. Our navigation systems select efficient routes. Our recommendation engines anticipate what we might enjoy.

These technologies are genuinely useful. I use them constantly.

But something happens when too much of our experience is organised around what we already know we want.

We lose opportunities to encounter what we didn’t know we were looking for.

I didn’t leave the house this morning to investigate the moral difficulties of caring for wild animals.

I didn’t expect to spend twenty minutes considering the social function of rat stories.

I certainly didn’t anticipate discovering that three women in a café might offer me a more compelling illustration of associative thinking than anything I could have found in a book about hypertext.

I went out for newspapers and coffee.

That’s all.

And the world offered something else.

Perhaps this is what wandering really means.

Not travelling without a destination, necessarily, but remaining open to the possibility that the destination might turn out to be less interesting than what happens along the way.

There’s no need to romanticise it. Most mornings will be ordinary. Most conversations overheard will remain conversations about the weather, shopping, troublesome neighbours, and the price of things.

But that’s precisely the material.

The ordinary world doesn’t become interesting only when something extraordinary happens.

It becomes interesting when we pay attention.

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The women are still talking.

My coffee is nearly finished, and my newspapers remain largely unread.

Somewhere in the pages in front of me, governments are making decisions, economies are shifting, wars are being fought, policies are being proposed, and the great public conversation of our age continues its restless movement.

Across the room, three friends are making their way through a different kind of news.

Who has been ill. Who has died. What happened in the garden. What the neighbours are doing. What they’ve been worrying about. What they remember.

The small dispatches of everyday existence.

I wonder whether future historians, given access to every newspaper published today but none of the conversations taking place in cafés, kitchens, gardens, and sitting rooms, would really understand what it felt like to be alive in this particular moment.

They would know what our governments did.

They might know what we argued about.

But would they know about the woman who rescued a hedgehog and couldn’t stop wondering whether she’d done the right thing?

Would they know how her friends listened?

Would they know how easily the conversation moved from the practical business of dealing with rats to the much larger business of living with uncertainty?

Perhaps not.

And perhaps that’s why I feel such affection for these small, unrecorded moments.

They contain something of the texture of being human that the headlines, however important, can never quite capture.

I came into town looking for a little noise, a little company, a change of scenery.

I found all three.

And somewhere along the way, I remembered why I used to spend so much time in coffeehouses.

It wasn’t just the coffee.

It wasn’t even the newspapers.

It was the possibility of being there when something happened.

Not something important, necessarily.

Just something.

A rat in a neighbour’s garden.

A hedgehog in a cardboard box.

Three women trying to make sense of it all.

And one invisible man, sitting nearby, wondering whether £9.50 was too much to pay for a morning in the world.

I still think it probably was.

But I’m rather glad I came.

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