I have escaped from the confines of the junk-room for a few hours. I’m holed up in the middle of the café my daughters work at for the morning - or at least until the lunchtime rush arrives. It’s a change of scenery - a chance to decompress.
The café is never quiet on a morning.
On the table to my left two young men are talking at speed about something incredibly important (or so it seems). The two ladies sharing their table are eating scrambled eggs, laughing, smiling, and seemingly having a much less important conversation.
On the comfy chairs in the corner a group of retired people are catching up mid-dog-walk. They look tremendously neat, tidy and put together. It’s a generational thing, isn’t it. There are two ladies and a gentleman. He just bought everybody a round of very specific cups of tea. The dog is very well behaved - a wire haired terrier of some description.
Across from me a kindred spirit is tapping away at a laptop - no doubt escaping from his own work-from-home bolt-hole for a couple of hours. A man across from him is frowning at a folded newspaper with a half-filled out crossword, occasionally taking a bite from a pastry and a sip of tea.
My youngest daughter is running back and forth in the kitchen. She works here most days while not at college. She’s in charge of washing up, and takes it tremendously seriously. Apparently the successful operation of the entire café hinges on her. I caught her eye a few moments ago and smiled. She let half a grin slip.
A new member of staff is learning the ropes during a lull in foot-fall - being taken through the point-of-sale system. Moments ago an interview happened in the middle of the café. This place never stands still. I’m not sure if that’s exciting or intimidating. I find myself embracing consistency and predictability recently.
Anyway.
Here we are. I should really get on with some work. I’m “paying code tax” at the moment - reviewing the thousands of lines of code I have written over the past several months - “tending the garden”. As projects grow, contort, twist, and evolve, you invariably end up changing your mind about how to do things - how to approach solutions to common problems - and rarely get the chance to revisit earlier work - to unify your approach.
I won’t bore you too much - otherwise we risk re-visiting the famous (in our house) dinner-table scene where I asked the children “why don’t you ever ask me what I did today?”. My other half stopped all the dinner table stories about school projects, playground arguments, dance shows, and football matches to ask “go on then - tell us what you did today”. I talked for some time about forking a codebase to integrate a business process with a document management system - in order to control permissions on document libraries in a corporate record management system. In the middle of it my other half interrupted - “… and that’s why we don’t ask Dad what he did today”.
The children laughed.