If you can’t get to the coffeeshop let the coffeeshop come to you.

I’ll never take a coffeeshop visit for granted again. I used that sentence as a one liner on Twitter last week and the responses showed me I’m clearly not the only one going through withdrawal symptoms, as we all sit at home wandering how long social isolation will have to go on for.

If you follow my Twitter feed you’ll know I’m a regular frequenter of the many excellent coffeeshops Norwich has to offer and that I tend to bombard social media with the coffee themed photo’s I take in them.

To me a good coffeeshop feels as if it’s more than just the sum of it’s parts. Obviously there’s the quality of the coffee and the food to take into consideration, but then there’s the music they play, the comfiness of the seats, the hours they’re open, how happy they are to let you linger over your cup and for the lone drinker how good the lighting is. The last one might sound a bit odd but if I’m on my own I do want to be able to read a book and also to make sure the coffee looks good when I take the inevitable photo. 

I suppose I could have rolled all those requirements up and said it’s all about the ambience. That wonderful, slightly indefinable word, which just makes you know a place is right. 

Last weekend the pangs were getting so strong that we decided to have a coffeeshop at home. We picked an interesting but unobtrusive playlist, found some back copies of Kinfolk for the table and made sure there was a sweet treat to go with the caffeine. It’s not that we haven’t been drinking coffee in these isolation times, it’s the other parts of the ritual we’ve been missing. It was a great way to spend a lazy couple of hours on a Saturday morning and we’ll be opening for business again this week.

So my suggestion is if you can’t get to the coffeeshop let the coffeeshop come to you.