It is not uncommon, should one be inclined to search for me on any given day, to find an old wooden chair supporting my meagre frame in a particular establishment in town. I use the word 'establishment' in order to avoid using the word 'Cafe', for fear of conjuring up images of Paris and leading you, imaginary reader, down conceited streets. The establishment I so frequently frequent is one of many such establishments in the rather odd city into which I appear to have flung myself and not unusual in any respect other than that it is the only one, to my knowledge, to have the word 'Cafe' in its name.

I have become attached to this little building because the first coffee I drank there was one of the best I have ever tasted. Not that I am snobbish in this regard - I can distinguish between good coffee and bad coffee, but little more. No, this one, the first one, tasted (or so it seemed to me) of the girl sat in the corner across from me, her whirling mane winding its lavish way across part of her worried face. I, the stickly flaneur, legs crossed as though preparing for a story about a boot to the groin (such is life), dreamily drinking up the subtle contours of her feline figure, nonchalantly draped across a table. She was Fairtrade.

Yet, I ask myself, how could each of those dreary sips possibly draw from a cup so mundane, so utterly cliched? Cliches, by definition, are prior to reality. They are the sworn enemies of dreams, ever reductive, ever sapping away at our will and our illusions of freedom. I think: the elation of that first cup of coffee was my own fantasy. Whether the girl was beautiful or not, I could not say, but I could say that the snapshot, in my mind's eye, of her languid posture, the vacant brilliance of her autumnal face, partly traced by windswept locks, was itself a motif. It was my own vivid, heaving version of a Gaugin, a Manet bursting at the seams with the imprints my own psychological traumas. My mind had made a masterpiece of that scene, but even now demonstrably lacks the artistry with which to immortalise it in a fragment, or an image. It was the impossibility, that inaccessibility of the beauty I find in art and life, which flowed into me and shocked my central nervous system. The caffeine was stronger that day.

I think: that empty seat mourns the absence of my fantasy. This sickly black dross tastes fouler by the day, yet I each day I return. It is a form of melancholia, such as life, for each day brings that vintage sense of loss - the loss of something I never had, defeat by some unknown force I shall never tame.