A Creature Of Habit

Wednesday 20th January 2010, 10.15pm, Mixay Guest House, Vientiane - Laos

Apparently no matter how far you flee and irrespective of everything you see and do on the way which changes you, some habits are too ingrained to relinquish.

In the summer term of my third year at University, way back in 2007 now, I had 4 fortuitous weeks after my final exams to wile away as I pleased, free at last from the shackles of study and the miserable afternoons wallowing in the muddy trenches of third semester library battleground. Casting off at last my albatross of educational duty, I spent an absolutely blissful month sat in Starbucks and worked my way through a multitude of long pined for literary fiction. I have always been an avid if not an obsessive devourer of novels, and although a keen and conscientious student, I resented every exam from my year 6 SATS right up until that last University test, because they prevented me from reading for pleasure without severe guilt pangs that I should have had my nose in a textbook instead. But it's not my love of books that has caused me to put pen to paper this evening, more my love of coffee shops.

Those 4 weeks where I made an indent in the sofa at Starbucks in Leamington Spa permanently solidified my consideration of these institutions as Grace-havens. They represent for me a sanctum of safety. From the low amber lighting to the chugs and clicks of the barista's work, the whirring hum of the smoothie machine, the bottomless cocooning of feather-stuffed armchairs, Joni Mitchell trilling away delicately in the background and of course, the best aroma in the world, coffee beans, hanging seductively from every oak wood, leather covered, brown tiled surface; what self-indulgent sanctuaries these places are to me.

I have been delighted then to discover these home from homes hidden around South East Asia. So far I have been a customer at three major chains - Bobby Brewers and Highlands Coffee in Vietnam, and True Coffee of Laos, where we turned up this afternoon after a mammoth 20 hour bus journey from Hanoi. What is more rewarding than arriving tired and expectant in a new city, nae, new country, than to be greeted by the sight of a major franchise coffee house round the corner from your accommodation? I'm stumped to think of anything. I can guess what some of you may be thinking about this Caffeine Addicts Anonymous admission. How exceptionally inane of me to go halfway round the world and spend my life savings to sit in evil, multinational, American inspired, corporate Capitalist conglomerations of glorified cafes. You may have a point, but I'm going to have to be stubbornly unrepentant on this one I'm afraid.

I have been, on the whole, a very well behaved tourist - diligently adhering to the advice of his Lordship the Lonely Planet and seeing everything I can of cultural interest everywhere I go in order to expose myself to true representation of the strange and exotic places I am lucky enough to visit. But sometimes you know, we all need a little bit of familiarity. To continue appreciating the new life you are leading it is important to remember the mundane, everyday habits which made you happy in your other life, otherwise how will you ever give up the strange and the exotic to return to coffee shop monotony?

The other day a friend of mine posted a link to a song on my facebook 'wall'. The song in question is by Charlene D'Angelo and entitled 'I've Never Been To Me'. It tells the story of a woman who spent her entire life travelling, searching and exploring the world for experiences and places which would fulfil her, only to realise at the end of her life that if she had stayed still, stopped looking, and listened to what her heart told her she wanted, happiness would have found her itself through love and family, and familiarity. My friend assures me that he was making no insinuations and quite adorably and typically of him just sent me the song because 'the video is hilarious Gracie.' Even if he didn't mean anything by it, I do see it's relevance, and give it credence to my own situation. I do not know when I shall return home or where will even feel like home anymore, and I am not sure what can make me happy or what it is that I have come looking for. I am comforted however, by the fact that I'm as equally likely to find it in a foreign tropical paradise, as I am in the humdrum familiarity of a coffee shop.