Café Life

There’s something quintessentially French about the chairs and small round tables you see on the pavements outside bars and cafés. The empty ones, as in this photograph, call at you to plant your bum down and order something cool, which of course is exactly what we did: right there, at the bar on the corner of the rue 26 mars 1944 in Ribérac.

Why don’t they have them in the UK?  The best you get are those ghastly wooden trestle tables with bird poo and lichen stuck to them, dumped round the back of the pub beside the other detritus, in what the landlord rather poetically calls his “beer garden”.  Beer, yes; garden, no – well, not with uncut grass that’s intermingled with nettles and thistles.

And having found a table, you then get splinters from the cheap pieces of wood used to make the darn things or worse, there’s chewing gum underneath the table top – don’t you love it when the gum gets stuck to your trousers.  There’s also that pervasive smell of creosote.   You also don’t get table service from a nattily-dressed waiter with a white pinny and a waistcoat with seemingly hundreds of pockets  – no, you have to stand in line inside and if you’re in luck, the bartender might grudgingly offer you a filthy tray to take your drinks outside.  Then the wasps arrive….

No, give me a cane chair and a small round table on the pavement in Ribérac. and I’m sold.

If only the French sold cask conditioned ales, now that would be heaven!

1 Table and 2 Chairs, Riberac, Dordogne.