At Café Eclectic

I'm the only customer at Café Eclectic, a pair of rooms in Montclair that do not offer a cup of tea. When asked for one I was offered Lipton's Brisk. A product I do not identify with, despite its many doubtless appealing qualities. I have instead opted for a cup of filter coffee to accompany me to the divan near the window where a cold draught is shooting up the back of my jacket. I'm looking at the café, a random assortment of scuffed, worn velvet and encrusted, overdone embroidered upholstery that manages to be somewhat comfortable whilst being a bit lurid at the same time. It would all be a lot more bearable if it weren't for the sports metal being broadcast for my individual enjoyment over the café's speaker system. Fortunately I've got my little set of headphones and a small but potent lump of digitally-encoded Bach to drown out what appears to be a sort of second-rate Chili Peppers thing I can hear occasionally between the pauses. My socks are quite full enough with my feet, thanks, chaps.

More impressive is the sunshine and snow and the odd combination of lushness and tackiness that seems to embody Montclair's spirit. This is such a strange part of the planet, the more so I think because of its seeming closeness to my own native habitat in the U.K., which it superficially resembles. I can't put my finger on it. It seems more ruthless and temporary, and also more filled with possibilities. A comparison between a motorcycle and an armchair seems apt. Which is more beautiful? Which more comfortable? Which, as Lipton put it, more "brisk"? Perhaps it's a necessary condition of being a tourist that I feel detached and aloof from whatever makes people tick here. It's a homeless sort of place, this suburbia. Everything seems like a facility, like a sort of institutional provision that one cannot take for granted. This doubtless has a positive connotation, but for now it seems a sort of coldness that rivals that of the weather.

I'm skewed, of course, towards this feeling, by my actual lack of a home here. I'm out of the house, trying to give my hosts a wee bit of free time whilst I roam the streets in gloves, and what V refers to as a "Toboggan" - what my own argot deems a "Bobble Hat"- and a pair of painful artificial boots I bought in haste from a "Shoe Source" when it became apparent that my existing footwear wasn't going to carry me across the surface of this snow-covered continent in anything resembling dry comfort. They are the colour of cardboard and the texture of suede under anaesthetic. They are very uncomfortable and a false economy. I curse them in their waterproof bigotry. My toes want to breathe and be free. Returning from my toes to my head, a traverse that takes in the grateful expression occaisioned by the hot coffee that is the inevitable alternative to a nice cup of tea- to my hat, in fact, a black and scarlet thing that causes my hair to rear up in amazement when I extract it from the depths of the toboggan like a conjuror's trick, it's kind of strange to be in a place cold enough that the scarlet orb atop my bonce doesn't attract the odd sidelong glance from passersby and sniggers from overexcited schoolchildren. Here it is merely sensible.

I have just discovered that i have forgotten to pack my reading material. The copy of the Montclair Times provided by the local newspaper emporium has failed to engage, but I can see what appears to be a second-hand bookstore from my coffee-scented eyrie. I propose to go and extract some neglected classic from within. Well, one lives in hope anyway.