Some cool teen chatting images:
Since when did Tesco start outsourcing their cafes to Starbucks
Image by Alan in Belfast
alaninbelfast.blogspot.com/2009/03/since-when-did-tesco-s…
In one corner, nine teens and twenty-year olds are sitting around a table, having divested a couple of other nearby tables of their chairs. They’re all leant forward, earnestly discussing and planning. An occasional titter circles around the group and then they settle again. Sorry for stereotyping, but they have the look of Christians planning a youth event somewhere the parking was free and the coffee trendy.
At another table up in this balcony vantage point, a thirteen year old is baby sitting his 12-18 month old sister while his Mum does the shopping in the aisles visible below. He’s not making as much headway with his muffin as the toddler is with the enormous cookie he chose for her. She giggles every now and again.
It’s not busy and all the while, the barista is chatting up two young students while his colleague follows the recipe for their drink. He announces that his tax is paying for their caramel.
A courting couple – no rings! – sit opposite each other on the brown comfy seats, clasping their life-giving grande mugs of steaming caffeine, not talking to each other. Just resting in each other’s company.
Me, I’m sitting down having done the weekly shopping up the road in Sainsburys, but their cafe closed much earlier. Tesco’s cafe is open – except it’s a Buckstars franchise. So no one under forty in sight. Isn’t this some kind of indirect discrimination – the only food and drink outlet in the store doesn’t cater for the older, tired shopper?
They’re giving away "complimentary grounds for your garden" – something I remember lugging across on a plane from a London Starbucks as an extra special Christmas present three years ago.
Back to my book.
(And no offence intended to any lovers of Starbucks!)
Christopher Calderhead
Image by On Being
I live in a rented New York City apartment. The only outdoor space I have access to, besides the sidewalk, is the paved alley alongside my building. And, like many of my neighbors, I use this shared outdoor space for all sorts of activities that don’t fit in a small apartment. As I write, a teen-aged neighbor is practicing his Junior ROTC drill in the alley, and I can hear the thud and clank of his rifle stock as he learns to twirl it in tempo.
It is not an unpleasant place to live. But there is nothing green—-no soil, no grass, no plants of any kind, except the street trees I can see from my front window.
This year when my friend Tamara invited me to share her backyard garden, I was delighted. She and her husband Karl have always been incredibly generous with their space; they love nothing more than hosting dinner for twenty-five on improvised tables and street-find chairs.
The garden in large by city standards. The vegetable patch is 8 feet wide and almost 25 feet deep, and there’s a patch of grass, to boot.
This year, we laid out the vegetable patch together. Neat, orderly rows were prepared for tomatoes, string beans, carrots, beets and radishes, and every kind of leafy green we could think of. There’s also an herb patch with oregano, chives, rosemary, sage, and lavender. I lobbied for nasturtiums to fill the planters on the paved part of the yard.
Last Saturday, Tamara, Karl and I were joined by another neighbor, Heather, and we did our first planting. The herbs and seeds for root vegetables went into the ground, as well as a selection of greens. We’re probably over-ambitious, and all of us are amateur gardeners, but it was good to be out doors on a sunny afternoon bickering over mulch and debating the merits of the soil. The elderly Greek couple next door chatted with us over the chain-link fence while they tended their own patch, with its fig trees and grape arbor.
"Spiritual" is not a word I use very much these days. It’s too nebulous, and encourages sentimentality. But I am interested in the actions that bring us back into balance, that make us whole human beings. And planting the garden with friends does that in two ways.
The most important for me is the way it brings us into a deeper sense of community and friendship. The garden is something we will share—-the work of setting out the plants and tending them, as well as the pleasures that will come in a few weeks as we begin to eat the fruits of our labors. And it’s been made possible by two people who are intent on living a shared life with their friends, an antidote to the competitive and atomized culture of this difficult city we live in.
And then, it restores balance to my life to be able to touch the soil, walk barefoot outdoors, and to look at the weather not just as the planet’s plot to make me lose my umbrella, but as a living system that will nourish–and threaten–the small plants we’ve put in the ground. Living a city life is compartmentalized and far from natural cycles–having a garden redresses that balance.
I’m hoping in a month or so I can be eating fresh beets and radishes with Tamara and Karl in their backyard.
(The picture shows Karl watching as Heather waters the first planted rows of the garden. Tamara sits in the background at the patio table.)
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