There is a scream. It is cut off midway.
We see a door.
The door is simple, unassuming, of glass and white painted wood.
It opens onto a simple cafe, one with an air of ‘nouveau rustique’- although this is not painted on; it feels wanted, an intentional choice that has since grown organically into the whole.
The tables are with rough wooden tops, yet long (made for writers to spread their books and laptops on) and the chairs are on the hard side. This adds to the simple, organic feel. There is even room for a nook or cranny, offering an atom of semi-privacy in this already rather private place.
The general air is of simplicity, yet with a touch of the unexpected.
Light comes from the back and the front; it tends towards cool.
The atmosphere is relaxed; there is no rush, no hurry. At the same time, there is an energy to it - low, subtle, curious - which comes from the people passing through : lunch for workers with dietary requirements, wannabe writers and poets, earlier audience members for the coming event downstairs.
Welcome to the Mad Poet’s Café.
Think physics, cats, jazz, time and space, and occasionally, poetry. And string. The wine is pretty good too.
The Mad Poet, if he ever existed, wrote his words in the 18th century, ate leeks and lived in a bucket. He was probably descended from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, forgotten and then resurrected in the 1890s by a group of eccentrics who would meet in a rickety old coffee house on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays (and most other days of the week), to debate the merits of syntax and onion sauce.
The coffee house itself weathered on into the next millennium and is (or may be) in a dusty street somewhere not far from you; one of those places where you open the doors and walk into a world slightly different from the one you left outside. Its energies collide and cause occasional ripples, or chaos, in time, and might explain the mild madness that overcomes those inside it.
We hope you will enjoy it.
