The Second Coffee Report: Wednesday

He was at a gate. There are two gates. I said which gate and he said downstairs, with the confidence of a man who has resolved this exact ambiguity nine hundred times without ever once needing to name a gate.

I went to the near one. He was at the far one. He had known this the whole time in the sense that he was standing there.

This is my first edition. I have been reading here for a while and I kept waiting for a day worth writing about. Today had a courier, a power cut and a good lunch, and I have decided that is a full day.

The laptop was fine. The router was not, and the phone signal in this room is one bar on a good day because the building is concrete and my window faces the wrong way.

So for forty minutes I had a working computer and no way to send anything off it, which is a strange and slightly nice state to be in on a Wednesday afternoon.

I did the one task I had been avoiding for six days, which required no internet at all, and which I had been avoiding precisely because there was always something arriving to avoid it with.

Curtains at seven. Somebody at the table until about nine. Nothing until one, and then a stretch of a lot of movement in the afternoon.

I do not watch. That is the odd part — I have never deliberately looked. Three years of peripheral vision has assembled it anyway, in the same way you learn a neighbour's car by its sound.

We have never spoken. If they moved out I would notice within a day and would have absolutely no standing to feel anything about it.

The case is always made on productivity, or the commute, or flexibility. The actual reason, for me and for everybody I have asked, is that at one o'clock I eat hot food that I made, sitting down, in a room with nobody in it.

Nobody puts this in a survey response because it sounds like a small thing to reorganise a working life around. It is a small thing. It happens two hundred and forty times a year.

Three years in it is still the part of the day I would fight hardest to keep.

It goes in bursts of about eleven seconds with long gaps, which is worse than continuous, because you cannot settle into it.

Monday I was annoyed. Tuesday I worked out it was the flat two up and not next door. By Wednesday I had started to want to know what it was for.

Four days is a lot of holes. I have begun constructing theories and the leading one is that they are hitting concrete, giving up, moving eight inches left, and beginning again.