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| Oxford, England. |
As I sit in one of Oxford’s average cafes, praying that I remember not to place any weight on the left-hand side of the table, since it would result in it jerking up, which would then result in my iced-latte—which is way more water than is acceptable, even at Starbucks, and much too warm for it to be marketed as an iced-anything—to become airborne for an immutable second, before it gracefully lands on my laptop, people around me are actually working. Imagine the horror. I can hear the barista with the perfect hair, clamouring in the kitchen, cleaning up before the next round of loud tourists and caffeine-deprived students inundate this quaint, black-and-white-interiored cafe. The electric roar of the coffee machine as it cleans itself commingles with the clings and clangs of the glasses he is putting away. Originating somewhere above my drenched head, George Ezra’s voice augments this…melody.
I glance outside. The beautifully banal brick houses with the beautifully banal flowers would have been a pretty sight, were I not tholing the regal process of hydrosis. In normal people talk: I am sweating my ass off. A man donning a tatty black t-shirt, distressed jeans, and a burgundy fedora—I didn’t even know they did Burgundy fedoras—catches my eye. This is not the sort of attire your average person in Oxford tends to find appropriate to wear outside the safe confines of his/her home. And it is certainly not the attire your average seventy-year-old in Oxford tends to find appropriate to wear anywhere. Seeing the youthful lovebirds on the other side of the road, FedoraMan shakes his head. A quick rightward glance tells him that an Indian girl, in her early twenties, who prefers her coffee overpriced and watery, had witnessed the whole thing; he, then, goes on to purse his weathered lips, shaking his head in a conspiratorial manner and I, having all the time in the world to procrastinate doing my assignment, indulge him by shaking my head right back in disapproval of the blatant show of sopping flesh on the historical streets of this slightly lovely, slightly drab, and extremely conservative town.
The boy sitting on the rectangular table outside, running interference between me and my co-conspirator, along with the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, which look like they hadn’t been cleaned since the first university had been founded here, remains oblivious to everything—from the seventy-year old with a fedora in this heat to the meaningful moment I had just shared with a stranger who might, or might not, be a pervert feigning reactionaryism—as he pours over a copy of “You Do You”, which matches the colour of his T-shirt.
As I contemplate all this, there is a flutter in my peripheral. I turn around in the most inconspicuous way I could manage. My best friend doesn’t think that turning around and gawking is low-key. Doesn’t she know that in the age of self-absorption, nobody pays attentions to anything that cannot be instagramed or tweeted about? And doesn’t he know I am a little too everyday (I refuse to use the word basic) to grace those social media sites with my attention? I see a girl, who, by the way, has nothing to do with the movement which had first caught my attention, enter the establishment. I see the exact moment the heat in the I-do-not-understand-what-ventilation-is coffeeshop slaps her blushing cheeks, for it renders her eyes into sewer-green globs and her nose becomes a crooked, but still picturesque, lane; as though she had opened a refrigerator with an open pickled-sandwich, which had been there for a little too long. As she uses the very same khaki foot, which she had used to step inside, to all but run out of this respectable establishment, I drink the last of my very last iced-latte in Oxford, hoping she does not bang into the FedoraMan and cripple him on her way out.
