All I want is a cup of coffee and a haircut

Picture: Facebook/Caffe Nero

I've got to that stage in the lockdown when it's become a matter of priorities. I've accepted that, probably, I won't get to see a Mediterranean beach this year and if I was to scale up the scope of disappointments, it's unlikely that I'll be spending any face-to-face quality time with the new colleagues I've only been working with since April. Stir craziness has yet to kick in, largely thanks to now living in a house with a garden, and with the occasional (don't tell my GP) breakout for fresh air and exercise. Last Saturday we ventured into the Surrey Hills and, not to overdo it, it was fantastic: a triple whammy of sunshine, an abundance of green and blue in the colour scheme, and a widescreen view to replace the 4:3 constraint of the living room windows I spend most of the time looking out of.

We've accepted that lockdown is a compromise, and quite a simple one to accept: you stay at home, you don't die. I'm quite down with that. And even if we start to consider creative alternatives to the traditional ten days somewhere relatively exotic, the prospect of caravan park staycations which may have hitherto been sniffed at, all of a sudden look quite attractive. I even spent Sunday drooling over a Sunday Times feature on campervan rentals. A 2-litre Volkswagen T6 California Ocean, with fitted kitchen, rooftop beds and furniture discreetly contained within the door panels, is now looking very viable (for full disclosure, I have also started watching cookery shows and Location, Location, Location, such is the need for escapism).

But to return to my original point, lockdown may have allowed the mind to wander, but clearly not everything is possible. So I've had to pare back my ambition and settle on just two things I need more than anything else to restore order: a decent cup of barista-poured coffee and a haircut. In the case of the former, I recognise that it is somewhat bourgeois. The Nespresso coffee pods we have do the job perfectly well. But thanks to 26 years of Friends repeats, the suggested ambiance of a bare brick-lined Caffè Nero has, tragically, become hard-wired into my needs. And even if pesky medical considerations have forced me to abandon lattes and cappuccinos for the bog-standard Americano (and decaf, too), the absence of an hour's quality time with family or friends, or simply in contemplation solitario, has, I've become creepingly aware, left a massive hole in my life.

Arguably less critical, depending on where you stand on such things, is the haircut. I very wisely visited my preferred barber of three decades just before the lockdown, requesting a neat short back and sides à la Daniel Craig (because, clearly, the current 007 and I share so many physical attributes...). That was in mid-March. It is now almost June. While my Barnet hasn't quite gone the full Castaway, it is now annoying me and my other half, with grey strands I'm normally in denial over poking out like twigs in a garden refuse bag, and a luxuriant mop developing on top that will, soon, resemble one of those awful men's hairdos you used see in pictures on the walls of hairdressing establishments in the 1970s.

So, coffee and a haircut. Not much to ask for. My spiritual cousins in Italy are now emerging from their own lockdown with much the same needs to fulfil, except they have discovered - and this may well be the pattern for us here in the UK - that things have changed. The Times today reports that, amongst a basket of everyday essentials that have received price hikes in Italy, the price of coffee and perfect hair (commodities that actually transcend the term "essential" in Italy ) has gone up, quite a bit. In Rome, an espresso that would have cost Eur 1.10 before the lockdown now costs Eur 1.50, a 40-cent increase that has left Romans horrified. Even worse for the Milanese, where espressos have been hiked as high as two euros. If you didn't know already, the morning shot of black goodness is a quasi-religious ritual in Italy, which is why there is increasing indignation. "We are reporting those cafés to Italy’s anti-trust authority,” Stefano Zerbi of the consumer group Codacons told The Times. "We remember how prices were all rounded up when Italy moved from the lira to the euro in 1999, but this is much worse."

Haircare has seen an even more inflationary increase. Italians venturing out, gingerly, to get their locks trimmed under surgical levels of socially-distanced, PPE-protected hygiene, have been met with bills of Eur 40, a full ten euros more for a cut than before the lockdown. On a more serious note, Italy's hairdressers and myriad coffee bars are typical of the country's small businesses struggling for cash and being driven to Mafia-linked loan sharks. Italy's national anti-loan-sharking association says that complaints from businesses have risen by more than 50 per cent in recent months, another sad indictment of the prevailing influence of organised crime in Italian society.

But while sympathetic to the Italian cause, and not wishing to descend into flippancy, I'm the kind of sucker that would not baulk at price hikes for a sniff of good coffee and a trim. Even if these industries emerge from the coronavirus crisis as black market items, I can easily see myself giving in to my normal principles about contraband in order to satisfy two needs that simply can't be properly fulfilled, either by the gurgling machine in our kitchen, or a brave attempt at self-maintenance by ordering clippers from Amazon.

Cup a load of this

© Simon Poulter 2017

For some people, the cup of coffee you see here on the right is a dependency. "It's my crutch" and "I couldn't start my day without it". Indeed, in the first couple of hours of the working day in the City of London, where my office is, you must keep your eyes peeled for fellow desk drones powering along the pavement, a rigid arm extended, cup in hand, like a cross between a Dalek and a Lego figure (perfectly formed for beverage carrying with their holed fists as, effectively, cup holders).

I first witnessed this coffee-cup-as-urban-street-accessory fashion 20 years ago in Seattle, America's self-appointed coffee capital. On every street corner people were engaged in conversation, lidded coffee cups in hand, lattes going cold. In New York, the outstretched arm-and-cup combo soon became a fixture as the coffee chains proliferated (there are more than 200 branches of Starbucks in Manhattan alone). Today, it is a common sight in almost every major city around the world.

Such is the prevalence of takeout coffee in London that the city contributes five million of the seven million cups that the entire UK throws away - every single day. That amounts to around 2.5 billion each year. The chains, mindful of their corporate reputations, have made much of making the cups as recyclable as possible...or so we thought. And, so, we dutifully stand over our office recycling bins, separating cups and plastic lids and the corrugated cardboard collars, thinking that we're doing something good for the planet and Brer Polar Bear. But no. It is now believed that less than 1% of those cups - 1 in 400 - actually ends up being recycled, with the vast majority ending up in landfill. Such is the scale of the problem that environmentalists have called on the government to introduce a tax similar to the 5p plastic bag charge to encourage people to use their own reusable cups and mugs.

However, the reason why it is not so easy to properly process these , however, is a simple case of municipal inefficiency: for all the green virtues of the cups' design - with recyclable cardboard and plastic - they have a fundamental flaw: a thin film of resin that keeps the coffee in which, I'm sure you'll appreciate, is something of a prerequisite. And it's this plastic lining that can't be easily separated from recyclable components by existing recycling techniques.

However, the City of London Corporation, along with the coffee chains and various large employers in the Square Mile, have launched a scheme to introduce recycling bins together with the start-up Simply Cups, which brands itself as "the UK's ONLY active cup recycling scheme". It has developed new techniques to effectively separate the cup components and make them fully recyclable, with the recycled materials ending up being used for everything from park benches to pens which will be then donated to schools, community projects and other beneficiaries.

The Corporation's 'Square Mile Challenge' is asking City firms with more than 500 employees to sign up to the scheme to have Simply Cups bins installed in their offices. The first 30 companies who do will even receive a year’s free collection. McDonald's, Costa and Pret a Manger have already been involved in a trial of the collection service. Simply Cups' Peter Goodwin says that the issue of coffee cups should be treated with the same degree of importance by companies and their employees as paper recycling: "Large numbers of coffee cups are binned in offices as people arrive at work or pop out for coffees throughout the day. We’d like to see responsible disposal of these cups become as commonplace as paper recycling schemes in offices and we hope that seeing the products that can be produced from their recycled cups will help motivate city workers to support the recycling effort."

Of course, use of one's own reusable cup is probably the most economic of all, especially as the coffee chains and their suppliers appear to be taking their time developing cups based on new, fully recyclable materials. But in the meantime, the City of London's campaign will at least create awareness of the enormous daily waste that I, by own admission, contribute to.