>….that they don’t ask me about these things first.

Some researchers have just spent three years exploring Britain’s café sector.

Their report is titled “The Cappuccino Community: Cafes and Civic Life in the Contemporary Community”

They’ve discovered, for example, that cafes are “places of hospitality, welcome and meeting for a very wide variety of people”

I could have told them that.

And that some cafés now attract particular groups of people, so that some cafés are “recognisably arty, child-friendly, studenty or touristy, or even cosmopolitan.”

Well, I’ll be buggered.

And they ” examined the ways in which quite mundane events such as borrowing a newspaper or spilling a cup of water were potentially integrative (or divisive) and how such encounters were then handled by customers”

As in “Go forth and copulate, that’s my copulating newspaper”, perhaps?

And they’re a vital part of our public life “where we encounter people who are neither our family and friends nor our colleagues at work”

Amazing.

Even more amazing is the fact that they made do with a mere £200,000 grant from the Economic and Social Research Council who are “an independent organisation, established by Royal Charter, but receive most of our funding through the Government’s Office of Science and Innovation.”

So – er – that would be £200,000 of taxpayers money to tell us that “the barista has emerged as a new form of public personality who de-anonymises our daily life in the city, as well as being a skilled maker of expresso-based drinks”?

Cheap at twice the price……

Read it here