The coffee shop was initially quiet on the two mornings that we managed to visit it. We thought it might be the case after the Welsh government have imposed new restrictions due to come into force after Boxing Day. For a long time it was just us, the skeleton staff, who in the company’s wisdom believe are all that is needed first thing, and the two middle aged men, who, like us always sit in the same place. I love to draw the thin man. His face is almost impossibly cavernous. And though I draw the other man over and over, he being usually the only one to study when it first open, his face is less dramatic, less stark. (We saw him on our walk in and he was rather off hand with his greeting. Fair enough, I said. However, I think he must’ve thought it over and was almost warm when we saw him the coffee shop later.) I love to him laugh though, when his friend, clearly the lugubrious one, makes his shoulders shudder with mirth.
A hour later the queue started to build. There were the swimmers, all muffled up. (How can they do it? We see them on our walk in, either in the water or just out, towelling their pink bodies down and no doubt feeling exhilarated. Though some do cheat with wet suits. There’s a real camaraderie amongst them, clearly.)
Then there was ‘Dylan Thomas’ and a line of other faces and bodies, some familiar and some new.
The effete man and his wife came and I tried to capture some of their intimacy, though from a discrete distance.
When the queue builds up, I think at one point it was out of the door, I have to draw so quickly to get an essence down before they move on. There is a frenetic-ness to it that I rather like. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Let me see, says my partner, oh, you got him. He is my witness, for the evidence, if that is the right word, is soon gone. I feel authentic drawing like this, there is a vitality to the process that stimulates and fires me. Though what the drawings are or are to become once the experience of watching is done, who knows?
I love the different gaits, the swathes of scarves and multi-coloured masks. There is a sense of belonging in being there drawing. I am making them my own, finding an allegiance with them in my observing. I like the new but I also like the regular-ness of it. Like the two little boys who come in with their mother and grandmother, rushing round to the little shelf by the loos to get the paper and wax crayons so that they can draw.
This week they had Santa hats on. Cute. Then there was the woman who sat by us wearing a huge woolly hat, who either read her phone or hugged her coffee cup in her hands. She had to take her glasses off to read and leant close to the screen her face almost touching it. I loved her concentration. She was enclosed in her own world, folded up.
Then there was the young man with the very pronounced jaw. He was as lean as a dancer. Was he French? The dunking of his croissant in his coffee may have been the tell-tale sign. I struggled to draw him initially, as he kept looking at me.
But then he finished eating and dedicated all his attention to his phone. (No one seems to read books, or even papers anymore.) Two women took the table that the two middle-aged men had vacated. They were clearly mother and daughter and both had a large amount of foundation on their faces and very black-dyed hair. There was a sickly-ness to them both. And they rarely talked.
When they left a man in a pink jumper and his friend occupied the table. He did most of the talking, mostly bemoaning the fact that Christmas was too commercial. What about chapel? he asked.
