...yesterday's visit to the Cafe Insomnia

...in all these months that the i've been drinking cafe-au-lait at the Cafe Muse, I've never visited the little place nearby...I've always been put off by the clientele and decor but also the name...The Cafe Insomnia. It doesn't bode well. Perhaps on occasion I've been tempted to drop in while passing the Cafe Insomnia...but I never ventured past the yellow door and I've always been frightened by the sounds of radical bonhomie that spills out into the streets.

That all changed yesterday when I saw an old friend in there...Ivor...who invited me in. For the past five years Ivor has been living in his current place, a small flat on th 3rd floor of a house in S**** Ma[d]chester. Four different people have ended up living in the room below. Sometimes in the middle of the night he presses his head to the floorboards to hear them s-s-snore. Sometimes early in the morning, before the trains and traffic interrupt his silent reverie, he also presses his head to the pillow just to hear the blood pound in his head. It reminds him of the many things that are part of him, that are found just under the veneer of his skin but has never seen. In some odd, disengaged and degraded way it also reminds Ivor that he's alive.

Ivor introduced me to Zotovitch...a regular habitue at the Cafe Insomnia...who it transpires is Le Rabelais supermarket's vice-president. He talks hard about the need for softening up Arabs for the market and advocates a permanent state of war. When asked about peace the answer cannot be found in his flabby words and rhetoric...nor in his overbearing but perhaps once handsome face. He desperately needs some exercise...for here is a man carved out of the worst type of lard (the sort that lies exactly halfway between piety and a bistro lifestyle) and yet he urges leaner and fitter men into war. Zotovitch's appetite for war would change the minute he was made to run round the training field, thus breaking him many weeks before any actual combat. Ultimately he requires a regime change from pate de fois gras to salad and climbing stairs. That or a change of menu is in order down at the Cafe Insomnia...