Serendipitous Moments and Flat Caps!

NOTE: This is not an advertisement - No, I haven't gone over to The Dark Side, blogging for money and giftettes - It's a musing on serendipity and Moments of Magic and Wistfulness. Love and Loss. Life itself...

In fact, magic moments feature widely in my blog this week - Do pop back later this week and hear my tall tale of wild salmon wrestling.

I have shed the maudlin.

It ages me, so Goddess only knows what it does to you. You, who have the misfortune of reading my more weepy and seepy moments...

Look at this place, up there: Looks very cosy, doesn't it?

It's called Flat Caps Coffee, and this is Flat Cap Joe.

Joe's coffee shop is called Flat Caps after the flat cap which Joe likes to wear - Flat caps are very traditional attire in the North East of England... Heck, the man might even have a whippet, tucked away under a stool!

THIS is Joe's story. It's probably a heartening story of a leap into the void. Taking risks. Joe moved on from banking after having been made redundant to become a successful Barista in our city, Newcastle.

I'm very familiar with embarking on that kind of journey. Like Joe, I'm facing redundancy as the politicos are closing my office, I think you know -- And I would never have started to think about becoming a Psychotherapist if it were not for finding myself in this life-changing moment.

Joe tweets on Twitter @Flatcapjoe. He also does Facebook - Flat Caps Coffee House. So does la Fhina.

A while ago, I wrote a piece of froth concerning a much-loved coffee shop whose passing I mourned. HERE in my archive it languishes, like a shiny shell buried under sand...

And this is what Joe wrote on Twitter, after he found it:

"Flatcapjoe Joe Meagher

this lady's blog mentions what is now Flat Caps Coffee but was once called The Bookhouse awomanofnoimportance.com/2009/05/fika-m… via @Fhina"

Ah, the bloggy-starvation loveliness that is Twitter, with its insistent and haranguing demands that you write no more than 140 characters, including spaces... What true blogger can live within those means? (What's with the font now?! Bejaysus! Sorry...)

Anyhoo, this was what I had written about the Bookhouse, which now houses Flat Caps Coffee:

"Good fika place? (That would be coffee to us non-Swedes) The Bookhouse, Newcastle, before Central Perk (from Friends) ever existed - Beautiful, spiral staircase leading down from excellent bookshop to cafe hangout - I don't even know what this place is now - But The Bookhouse remains in the mind like a lost lover, whom you never really wanted to let go, and you never properly bid adieu to... "

So, my lost (fictional, probably Brazilian, for the coffee...) lover has been returned to me... I'm not sure what to say to him, now I'm married to GJ... Bit awkward that one!

But I might be giving Flat Caps Coffee my winter trade - Meeting with fabulous friends and clutches of colleagues, seated in what look to be its dainty little niches, quaffing beautifully prepared coffee like real Ladies Who Lunch do; musing on my future which will be I hope, just as bright as Flat Caps Coffee is...

I like serendipity. I needed to hear Joe's story, and meet the Coffee House and the Salmon this week.