Today is yesterday’s tomorrow.

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Christmas Eve a few years ago, pre-covid, I was nearly in tears. Nostalgia does that to me, it lays me low. Lazy atmosphere in a Tuesday morning café. Lazy and slow, air heavy with coffee grinds and the winter sunshine outside leaking in through the open door along with eddies of street-flavoured air. Traffic, conversations, the whoosh of Peter at the coffee machine. Leonard Cohen started to moan on the radio and an indistinct vision of Genoa began to form but never reached completion. Sounds, smells and colours drifted in and out of my head and I sat looking vacant and tearful while Suzanne took me down once more to her place by the river. I mouthed the words of the song, careful to let no noise escape. Leonard finished, and some ditzy teenager broke the spell and vomited out a popular ditty full of key changes and inanities as the modern formula dictates. The new girl at the counter was called Suzanne so I asked her for tea and oranges that come all the way from China but she missed the cultural reference and that made me feel old, irrelevant and strangely other worldly (should that be all one word or hyphenated?) so I slunk off to build a little house deep in the forest and hoped that Marianne would be back working in the café the next day so that on leaving the café I would be able say "So long Marianne" and she'd smile complicity and just know where my mind had been.