We called in there for coffee. I remembered the cafe from years before when I used to escape from my parish to a parishioner’s caravan at Waipu Cove, once a year in February/March, and study German. Now, fascinatingly, the cafe had acquired a neighbour, a real live apothecary. I am not making this up. He has a modern, ordered, attractive shop, in welcoming colours, and he advertises herbal remedies for just about everything. He describes himself as apothecary. So that’s great. Warkworth does not have an apothecary, so far as I know.
But now, in the coffee place, wall to wall noise. Noise seemed to be essential. All the rest of Waipu and surroundings was quiet. In the cafe, however, something that passes these days for music was playing, relentlessly. I suspect no one in the last ten years has asked why. They always play music. Everyone does. Their coffee machine was steaming and roaring. The barrista-girl regularly, every 20 seconds, shatteringly bashed something down, I presume to clear an accumulation of coffee grounds. Locals visiting seemed to feel a need to shout to each other. None of the staff seemed remotely perturbed by this din.
We had recently had lunch in a Thai cafe in Paihia where, although the food was magnificent, the constant din was not. Concrete floor, and metal-legged chairs being scraped across the floor. No one seems able to lift chairs these days. Someone out the back, building something, was hammering...
Well, life tends to be a noisy place. It doesn’t need to be, but it is. I suspect that this level of noise is essential to our culture now. Being at home, for a few of us, means escape from all that. I wrote about silence in this blog once before. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
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