Ian McMillan: In search of drizzle cake and a bijou seaside café

Let’s face it: we’re trudging. That word trudging, with its echo of the sound of feet almost sticking in the mud, feels just right for what we’re doing in the drizzle which, as we trudge, seems to be growing up and becoming full-fat rain. We’ve come on a weekend away near the sea and we’re grudgingly trudging in the rain.

If we were at home and we’d gone for a walk and it started raining we’d go back to the house and put the kettle on and sit on the settee but of course a kind of holiday stubbornness has set in and, even though the forecast said there was a very good chance of rain we decided to take a chance. The wind, a late riser, has got up and is rushing around in excitement. I can hardly see a thing through my glasses. We trudge on.

I decide to try what I call my Bijou Café trick. This trick stems from similar drizzle-infected holiday years ago where I said with great confidence that, around the next corner, there would be a welcoming bijou café that served delicious coffee and cakes that would make you feel like a better human being, and by some miracle there was such a coffee. And the coffee was delicious and I left the café a better human being covered with cake detritus. And ever since then I’ve tried to repeat that trick and it’s never worked since but I felt sure that today, mid-trudge, it would.

I say to my wife, or the person I assume to be my wife because I can’t see her through the mist and rain, ‘There’ll be a lovely bijou café just down that side street there’ and I fling my arm extravagantly towards a minor road with a pillarbox on the corner.

Somehow I believe that the café will be there, like a kind of hidden kingdom that only I know about, a sort of Shangri-La with teapots. In my mind we are already sitting down at one of its tables and we are perusing the menu. The café is warm and my glasses are steaming up. Someone brings freshly-baked cakes to the counter. There is cheerful chatter and laughter.

My brows are knitted and furrowed as we approach the side-street because I am trying, through sheer willpower, to make the café appear.

When I’m reading a book or watching a film I like a happy ending; perhaps not an orchestrally noisy happy ending but more a subtle happy ending that leaves me with a warm glow that is thoughtful at the same time.

So wouldn’t it be good if we turned down that rainy side street and there really was a bijou café? What a happy ending to the column and to our trudge that would be!

I’ll leave you in suspense…

(Spoiler: there wasn’t one)