The Customers

I work in a rather quaint independent coffee house as my Saturday job. I have often felt that it provides an excellent social commentary, partially because the range of personalities we get is staggering and partially because on a particularly slow shift I often unabashedly eavesdrop when all other boredom-cures fail me. In fact, I think it would make the perfect 'kitchen-sink drama', but as I'm no playwright, I'm going to write down its workings in the only way I know how.

The man who looks like Jesus and his clan: The man of about thirty with extremely long hair never orders from the menu, but an odd concoction of ingredients from different meals. Always orders a chai latte. Always gets his friends to pay. He's bonkers, but he's lovely really. I'm pretty sure he's asked every single female worker on a date and describes us as work's 'glorious goddesses'.

The families with young children: On a good day, they make work seem cheerful. On a bad day, particularly if hangover-fuelled, they are irritating. Overprotective, shouty parents, screaming babies and toddlers that get under my feet.

The hippies with the baby: First impressions in this case lie. They seem like a kooky but lovely new family, but in actual fact, she is a moaner (complaining at the smallest of things) and he follows her every order. She breastfeeds in the cafe, as we're on the breastfeeding-friendly register, which is absolutely fine and I'm all for, until she invites her baby, Meredith, for 'a bit of juicy booby'. This disturbs me greatly.

The celiac elderly couple: He is very short, shuffles along and always wears a trilby. She is smily, with black teeth and whiskers. When they walk to their table, before they order, I'm already making their two pots of tea with extra water and extra milk and getting a gluten-free cake for him and a bake-well for her. Without fail they ask me how I am. Sounds basic, but it's more it's more than you get from most.

The banana man: I am yet to learn his name after 18 months of seeing him weekly, but banana-man is around 60, odd and verging on scary. He is always in a suit, always drunk, always messy. He orders something that is nearly, but not quite on the menu, but we can adjust things to his liking fairly easily. Along with his meal, he orders a banana and a coffee, which he uses to save his table while he steps outside to smoke his pipe. After he leaves, there is always a huge mess of food on the floor.

The toffs, the luvvies and the skivvies: The cafe is situated two minutes away from my city's theatre, so quite a lot of the time we have people from the theatre coming in. This ranges right from the audiences, to the actors, to the backstage staff. Always take-out if it's the actors or stage-staff, always eat-in with 'could you possibly hurry up? We're due at the theatre in 5 minutes' for the audiences, after they've ordered their skinny-decaf-half-shot-latte-with-vanilla and a goats-cheese-prawn-and-pancetta-warmed-but-not-too-warmed-croissant-with-no-butter. Usually, despite the slight stress that they all ensue, I like the people from the theatre. Even if the actors are terribly pretentious, the staff terribly 'time is money' and the audiences terribly last minute. I love the sense of occasion they add and I'm a bit of a luvvie myself, I must admit.

The woman who buys us Cadbury's Roses weekly: Every Saturday morning when I walk into work at 10:30, without fail Mary Jones is sat on our sole sofa, staring out at the world with her tea and toast. She is (as she recently informed me) 86, very little and very Welsh. Mrs. Jones appears to be constantly surprised at people who are nice to her and what I class as basic manners, she classes as angelic behaviour. She tells me and my workmates so many stories, occasionally repeated, but always interesting. She was an evacuee in World War Two, apparently, and tells me that running in the English countryside with her fellow evacuees created some of the most wonderful of her memories. Those memories are what made her return to England when she was 20, when she met the man she was to marry. Unfortunately, her husband passed away ten years ago and they didn't have children, so she is, as she tells us, rather lonely. But I like to think we play a part in brightening her day and though she is sometimes tiresome to other customers when she talks to them, she's always a joy to me. She plans to write her memoirs and bring them in for us all to read.

The woman who watches you work: The best I can say, quite frankly, is she means well. Evidently a very lonely woman, Mary graces us with her presence every single day for at least an hour, sometimes visiting twice in one day. On first inspection, she seems like a harmless, if very chatty, 60-something woman. However, when subject to her judgemental nonsense for hours, she becomes tiresome. It would take me an age to write all of her irritating traits, but suffice to say, she puts her foot in it on any almost minutely basis.

I could go on and on, our list of regulars is seemingly endless. No doubt my job will feature greatly in my portfolio anyway.