Postcards from a Previous Life (2) Coffee shop loyalty cards

Strange the habits you fall into. Takeaway coffee (albeit sometimes in a reusable cup) or coffee-while-waiting-for-late-people or to punctuate shopping or study was a staple of my existence pre-covid. Before work and between work and hitting the BL reading toom of an evening, on transport in lieu of breakfast, and to sweeten train delays or early starts. 

As a consequence I have no fewer than seven loyalty cards, little oblongs of coloured cardboard or plastic, all with one or two stamps that will likely now never get filled up.

The Brompton Cemetery One

This should have been easy to complete. I used to walk through Brompton Cemetery quite regularly after work on light evenings, picking out the graves of John Snow and Emmeline Pankhurst and trying to find Henry Cole's, but the cemetery fights a losing battle with brambles, and although I could identify where it was (there's a handy map available when the office is open) I couldn't get near it. 

Caffe Nero (x2)

I imagine Caffe Nero are really suffering in London during the pandemic. Like so many of the chain coffee shops they are or were at saturation point, and I'm sure I've read somewhere that the chains deliberately overextend themselves and then close the less profitable ones down. The one in Kensington used to be in an odd-shaped glass box next to the parade with High Street Kensington Station in it, and the mezzanine narrowed to a point that had to be left empty because nothing could really fit in it and even if it had you'd have had to squeeze past the other tables to get out (image link here). I used to go there for lunch sometimes (healthy lunch of cake and coffee and library book) or to meet up with my cousin, but it's been pulled down now, as part of High Street Ken station rebuild. 

G like Gelato

This was a smallish place on Wimbledon Bridge over the railway, since closed - a casualty of Covid at a guess. The coffee and croissants were nice and they did quite well, especially in the summer months when there were queues for gelato, but there was only room outside for a couple of tables and the waning of commuters and transport must have affected all takeaway sales but especially those so near stations - people used to buy coffees to drink on the tube and train, since that was dead time - and while in summer 2020 there was a slight resurgence, probably because it was still possible to believe things were going to bounce back to normal, by summer 2021, despite 'freedom day', a lot of people had realised this is what is normal now. 

Wayne's Coffee

I'm not sure if this coffee shop is there or not, although there is still a coffee shop and sandwich place on the site. It was all very dark wood and hipster with low hanging lights you bang your head on when you stand up (and remember folks, I'm just five foot tall) and mats for recharging your phone through osmosis or however that works, but there's been a name change since I was going into the office regularly and I'm not sure if that means it's a new place, or the same place with a few tweaks.  

Costa Coffee

I am actually still using this one. Not centrally or regularly but very occasionally in Morden while waiting for a bus (our regular bus into Morden was pulled due to a damaged bridge, and the replacement was half-hourly. Normally I'd just walk, but not if I had lots of groceries). 

It's a new branch they've opened near the station (reaching out into zone 4 now zone 1 is quiet I suspect). They send me emails encouraging me to order online and telling me the latest festive things they're selling (lots and lots of cream and sugar). Weirdly the first time I went I found they had a nice little patio garden, and then they never opened it since. Maybe they think it's too cold. 

Illy

No idea where this one came from. Illy is a coffee brand, and I doubt every independent coffee shop that serves it uses this same loyalty card, so it must have been somewhere specific I thought I'd come back to in the before times. 

Ritazza

I've only seen these at stations and from what I remember of my experience the coffee was scalding and bitter but thankfully caffeinated, and they were open when some of the other places weren't, so ideal if you're changing trains at some awful soul sapping hour (something else I very much miss). 

Take any card, take my card.

Postcards from a Previous Life - The Oyster Card

On Friday the annual travelcard on my Oyster card ran out. I actually debated with myself whether to cash it in when lockdown came, but you don't get the full amount back and I was still using it from time to time, and it didn't seem unthinkable that we would be back to some level of normality in a few months (a few months being one of those moveable feasts - a few months from now, and six weeks later a few months from then, and so on). 

It saw a bit of action over the summer when the museums opened up, (the Kimono exhibition) and a couple of bus trips up the hill to Sutton High Street and over to Nonsuch Park; precisely two forays into the office where I also returned and picked up new library books, and also over to Southfields where I have a cousin whose garden I could sit in and drink wine, in that sunny period when we were allowed to sit in other people's gardens. 

But mostly it lay dormant while I walked. I started shopping at the small Co-op and the Polish shop Pawelek with the nice bread,  both of which I can comfortably do in my lunch break. Less often I took the slightly longer walk into Morden town centre to the chemists and the Sainsbury's after work. I ordered a veg box every week - something I'd thought about but never actually done as veg takes a while to prep and cook and it was easier to come home and have pasta and tinned tomatoes or soup or something. 

And now my travelcard has conked. Apart from the remaining £5 top up - which I haven't used up yet - my Oyster is redundant. I can use my debit card if I need to go anywhere, and there is almost nowhere that I need to go. 

I wonder will I ever get a travelcard again? Even if (fingers crossed) the vaccination program does mean that we can move more freely, breathe more easily, open shops and schools again, I can see office workers like myself being told to stay at home anyway. So many of us are turning in our work quite efficiently as we are, and the people who do have to be physically present (social care staff, builders, librarians, cleaners, etc) can be more safely distanced from one another both at work and also, importantly, on public transport, if we aren't clogging it up. 

In a way I'm sad. I liked having a travelcard. It was like the key to the kingdom, the freedom of the city. You could look at the tube map and know you could travel anywhere within the grey band of Zone 4 (in fact, after his divorce my brother and I took trips out to the some of the edges of the tube map. Uxbridge and High Barnet and Upminster) without paying a penny more. 

I need never go straight home from work. Could wander as far as Clapham or Notting Hill or Waterloo in the summer, pick up the tube or any of hundreds of buses, dip in and out of shops on the Kings Road for Christmas shopping, practice my 'life' drawing in the V&A galleries on their late night openings, go for drinks with friends or family. 

I also liked the clean, uncluttered design of the Oyster, the blues and whites and distinctive TfL rondel. I kept mine in a leather card wallet with a window in it so it could be seen, along with my library cards and coffee shop cards - things I only needed from time to time and which wouldn't 'card clash'. Other things, of course, which I rarely use now.