Sartre, eat your heart out.

We had a secondhand bookshop here in Didsbury - well, it still is a secondhand bookshop (though once it was an ethnic clothes and bit-and-bobs shop run by my friend Judy), but they've now turned the front bit into a little teashop and called it The Art of Tea (though they also serve pretty good coffee) and bake yummy cakes on the premises. Anyway, in spite of what the local paper would have you believe, I've never been a big frequenter of the local cafes, but just recently John and I have been tempted into the Art of Tea, and would you believe it, just as the local paper would have it, it turns out to be a right Mecca of metropolitan arty types. First off this afternoon we discovered poet Phil Davenport working away on his computer, and then when we sat down at a nearby table we discovered among the used cups and plates a discarded draft of someone else's poem - a poem full of food images, perhaps not surprisingly.

I tell you, it's the Left Bank of the Mersey round here...