Of course nothing so dramatic as the title suggests has actually occurred. Or if it has happened then the culprit is only myself. If I hadn’t mentioned it before, I had finally found ‘my local’, a café close by home I would regularly go to write. Good coffee and good atmosphere, the two things I look for when renting out office space for $3 an hour or so.

I had been wandering around all of Sydney trying all sorts of places, revelling in the abundance of good quality espresso but still had not had found a regular place to write. When it finally happened I thought I had achieved some sort of milestone as a writer. Yes, now I have MY café. I am a writer.

The boss, Mr P and his barista John, run a friendly, bubbly service and were always happy to let me take up one of their tables, drinking a single short black over the course of an hour. Writing was progressing well there.

All that has changed.

Ahem. That sounds a bit dramatic. What I mean is, the coffee is still great, the guys still entertaining. The problem is I can no longer get any writing done while I’m there. I started volunteering as a runner there in the mornings, which means I help serving the coffee, occasionally pulling the espressos, though it is still a bit hectic during the morning rush.

I’ve been pulling coffees at church for a while already but working in an espresso café is a whole other ball game. The atmosphere is fun and the energy is great. And I get free coffee now. All at the low cost of losing my writing place.

Sometimes I go back in the afternoons after my other casual job finishes and though I’ve packed my laptop for writing, I often find myself chatting to Mr P about coffee if I’m not practicing pulling one myself. I can’t even think of finding another café to write in, so I’m going to need to discipline myself when I go to write there, maybe employ headphones. Or maybe do as I’m doing now, writing in my kitchen before I head out to face the morning coffee rush.