HOOPS

So here I am. Standing against the work top in the kitchen (my eating position). I've just had lunch. A very economical affair but very tasty (cheese on toast). Yes. Satisfying. I feel like going outside and hugging my enemies now, thumping the air around me and wiggling down the street, the way a duck wiggles its tail when getting settled in the water. 

Here's the thing. I love dated cafes. You know the ones. With the milk churns and orange or red plastic chairs. They offer 'all day breakfasts' for about three quid. You often have to struggle to have your voice heard above the staff shouting the completion of the order, the big boiling kettle and the crackling, tinny radio blarring out advertisement, football commentary or pop music dated from 1974-1994. These places, like labour clubs, exist, it seems, outside of time, and yet they adapt, but don't adapt.  Here is a picture of the very first cafe I ever (to my knowledge) went to, some time in the mid 70s, when I was fab, I mean, a toddler. It's called Krumbs cafe. As far as I'm aware it's still going strong. 

Thousands of cafes like this exist. So they should. In an age where hardly anything feels authentic or is authentic anymore, it's not a surprise to find post-modern retro cafes dotted about, usually in arty districts, where for irony's, authenticity's , kitch's sake they will charge £5.20 for a bacon barm, that should easily be barely above a quid. Yep. You'll see 'em. Retro cafes with motorway cafe prices. To be fair the cafe in Manchester's Cafe Pop was reasonably priced and they served a mean sausage sandwich. That was ten years ago though. I was a newly qualified teacher, going through a retro phase. I bought a retro trackie top from Pop Boutique. I find that as I'm getting older the zipped up trackie tops don't work. Especially if you don't have really long legs and arms. You end up looking like a short-arsed Mancunnian drug dealer. But I'm digressing...I'll just wear lots of black, like Giorgio Armani.

These cafes serve food, healthy or not, that actually fills you up and leaves you feeling satisfied. Real food. Not rabbit snacks, served between wood chipped brown bread for four quid. As for the decor, badly lit/ composed framed photographs of sub-Wimpy burgers, milkshakes and chips, not looking at all edible, is the order of the day. In fact I have yet to see a picture of a jacket potatoe with ANY filling that doesn't put me off. And I like jacket potatoes. 

Thing is, I wouldn't mind me own caff. I want to have the freedom, guilt-free, to serve unhealthy food that, god, is like an orgasm for the taste buds. I'm not concerned about the high fat, salt and sugar content.  It's fairly obvious to anyone with enough brain cells that this cafe won't promote healthy eating or lifestyle. You don't have to go there everyday for all of your meals.  Anyway I could have one which has two floors. The upstairs version of the cafe would be like the healthier version, as if the greasy spoon original downstairs had been remixed by Heston Blumenthal, like he did with Little Chef. I want my menu to look like this:

But it also serves cheese on toast, egg on toast, spaghetti hoops on toast and many other things on toast. It must serve vimto as well, hot vimto and bovril in the winter.  My cafe will be called Hoops.  I suppose it would all seem very post-modern and knowing, especially if I promote the menu of the day on twitter and set up a Facebook group, inviting you to 'like' it', and sell things like Soda stream soft drinks, Mr Kipling cakes, Sara Lee gateaus. Maybe it'll have a kiosk, a kind of tuck shop that serves Golden Wonder crisps, boiled gob stoppers like Jawbreakers and popping candy. I don't know. 

Anyway, best thing to do, to avoid the accusation that Hoops isn't authentic enough, because it's too retro is to actually go back in time. Come on then. Step into my time machine. 

Hold tight! Ready? Whiiizzzeeeeee! 

Okay. We've arrived in 1984. Now I can open my own cafe without being knowing and post-modern. There will be some obstacles I'll have to overcome first, such as the paradox of two versions of me co-existing in the same time. Right. Let's do it. I'm not going to have my cafe's radio tuned to medium wave Radio 1, with the tinny sounds of Gary Davies, Peter Powell and Simon Bates waffling on about what they did over the weekend, how they spent their wages and who they bumped into over a backdrop of Nik Kershaw, Black Lace and Strawberry Switchblade. I'll have that new fangled MTV beamed in, if I can afford a satellite dish. Yep. Non-stop, cutting edge music video. This is the future. 

Right. Let's do some market research. We'll step into that old cafe in Library Street, Wigan. Plastic chairs? Check. Milk churner? Check. Smoking policy? Check. (cough) Naff framed portraits of strawberry sundaes? Check. Oh look! They sell egg and chips here for 45p! Shall we have some? 'Egg and chips, twice, please!', 'Sorry? But it is real money!' Let's just go back. No point in going to my bank in 1984. I only have about £3.50 in my account. I know that could get us egg and chips twice, a couple of milkshakes and leave us with enough money to get ten Benson and Hedges between us, but that isn't the point. We'll go back to the future and start again. Whhheezzzzeeee!

Yeah.