Day 100: Friends with bicycles

I'm in Amici & Bici, a coffee shop on London Road. I'm by myself. This is a big deal.

I get incredible anxiety, thumping and leaden in my chest, whenever I'm alone and I walk past a coffee shop or bar I haven't been in before and I think about going in. It's weird. I get suddenly terrified that I'm not going to know the Procedure - that over the threshold in the darkened recesses of this strange new territory will be a coffee shop or bar unlike any other coffee shop or bar I have yet visited, with an esoteric ordering policy - that like I'll stumble in all awkward and sweaty, glancing left and right shiftily like a cartoon burglar, and I won't know that here you're supposed to post your drinks request into a slit between the floorboards, or whisper it to the cat painting in the corner, or just go round the counter and help yourself to that carrot cake sitting in its case there - and everyone will see me doing the Wrong Thing and tut and shake their heads and hound me back out of the door with their stony piercing glares of judgement.

I mean, I know that's insane. I know it is. But in that split-second as I'm walking past on my way down the street and I see a new place I could go in, I always have that lightning thought - What if there's a Procedure? What if I don't know the Procedure? And that zap of fear sends me puttering on my way past the new place and into somewhere old, and safe, and... Starbucks.

I don't get this anxiety when I'm with other people. When I have a friend with me I get a frisson of excitement out of not knowing What Happens at a place. I make a joke out of it with the server, even purposefully push the uncertainty into mild social transgression to see what will happen, to try to chip away at delineated order and routine and structure to find the real beating realm of chaos beneath. Cashiers get so bored. Why not be a bit silly with them and remind both you and them that we're strange funny human beings, not robots stuck in an endless loop of propriety protocols?

Except suddenly when I'm by myself all my confidence in that game falls away beneath me, and I'm left stood in a spotlight at the counter twisting my coattails feeling weird and twitchy and on some icky, repulsive way, seen.

So I don't go in new places. I usually chicken out without even being consciously aware of what I'm doing. I just get a pang of social anxiety and before I know what's happened I've quickened my pace and walked on by, and often the whole decision doesn't even reach my top layer of thought except as the last wispy ends of tentacles going all the way down that up here only stir up a vague sense of cowardice and regret, feelings that I don't dive down to analyse but merely let swirl with all the other turbid waters, sloshing around, spilling over the edges of my brain.

So but today I churned this all up as I strode into town, passing a string of coffee shops that looked delightful in the distance but that one after another I hurried past rather than entering. I thought about what exactly it was I was doing - avoiding a New Place in case I didn't know the Procedure, and I thought how stupid this is. Not even wrong or pathetic, just stupid. Not facing that fear of the unknown is worse in the long term than facing it. I've had a lifetime of avoiding things that trigger my social anxiety, and it hasn't worked. Running away isn't better.

... All of which is to say at half one in the afternoon today I find myself in a bright and airy cafe called Amici & Bici, by myself, waddling sheepishly up to the counter.

And you know what? The Procedure is not immediately apparent. I can't tell whether it's counter or table service. It actually is kind of confusing. There's no cast-iron rules in this country, borrowing from so many cultures as we do. So I stand at the counter, and wait to see if the woman tells me to take a seat. She doesn't, so I order coffee and cheesecake, pay at the till, and go to sit down. On each of the tables is a pot of flowers, and in each pot is a little note saying:

"Amici & Bici. Please place your order at the bar."

I smile reading this. None of us know what we're doing. We're all muddling through.

And I drink my coffee, eat my cake, and continue on into town. It's not like any of this is a major step for me. The rest of my day goes as it would have done, filled with minor frustrations and failures, all of the usual stuff. But I did go into that coffee shop. However tiny and silly that is, it's better than walking past. It's something.