The Library Cafe

[Tom March]

Hello all,

Do we all remember the library cafe and then Kaleidoscope that followed?
Well can anyone guess what the new name for Kaleidoscope is, after some
recent renovations?

Gone are the reclaimed plastic counters, instead we have sweeping white
ones. It seems to be the same equipment behind them though; familiar
grease stains and all that. The same menu too: nondescript brown salty
stuff and chips.

Incidentally, for anyone who's interested, the price of a sausage batch
is now 1.20 gbp, up from 95p last year. I suspect the staff haven't seen
much of this unprecedented 25 percent increase.

Ooh it makes me mad.

-Tom

[CrazyDave]

I'm going for "the library cafe". Rebranding back to your old name is
all the rage (consignia).

The last time there was a 25% increase it was down to price increases
due to the foot and mouth crises. Actually I don't recall them revoking
those.

[Tom March]

Post by CrazyDave
I'm going for "the library cafe". Rebranding back to your old name is
all the rage (consignia).

Close, they've actually gone with "cafe library". I kid you not.

-Tom

[CrazyDave]

Post by Tom March
Close, they've actually gone with "cafe library". I kid you not.

Sounds about right from I remember of the politics in my last year. The
way things appeared to be going, the library now gets all its meager
funds from the profits of the cafe, so belongs to it, hence the new
name. Oh hang on, which got rebranded?

Seriously though, they must have spent a something of the whole
Kalaidascope thing. I wonder if it was only meant to last 5 years. More
importantly can you still watch Quincy/Diagnosis Murder at lunch time
in there?

[CrazyDave]

Post by Tom March
Close, they've actually gone with "cafe library". I kid you not.

Sounds about right from I remember of the politics in my last year. The
way things appeared to be going, the library now gets all its meager
funds from the profits of the cafe, so belongs to it, hence the new
name. Oh hang on, which got rebranded?

Seriously though, they must have spent a something of the whole
Kalaidascope thing. I wonder if it was only meant to last 5 years. More
importantly can you still watch Quincy/Diagnosis Murder at lunch time
in there?

[Peter Oliver]

Post by Tom March
Do we all remember the library cafe and then Kaleidoscope that followed?
Well can anyone guess what the new name for Kaleidoscope is, after some
recent renovations?
Gone are the reclaimed plastic counters, instead we have sweeping white
ones. It seems to be the same equipment behind them though; familiar
grease stains and all that. The same menu too: nondescript brown salty
stuff and chips.

Last time I visited, I was surprised that they'd managed to refurbish
and rebrand Airfare into something that turned out food that, although
it looked different, tasted exactly the same as it ever did.

[Martin Eyles]

Post by Peter Oliver

Post by Tom March
Do we all remember the library cafe and then Kaleidoscope that followed?
Well can anyone guess what the new name for Kaleidoscope is, after some
recent renovations?

Noooooooo. I liked Kaleidoscope as it was.

Post by Peter Oliver

Post by Tom March
Gone are the reclaimed plastic counters, instead we have sweeping white
ones. It seems to be the same equipment behind them though; familiar
grease stains and all that. The same menu too: nondescript brown salty
stuff and chips.

I seem to remember the order of the day being baked potatoes.

Post by Peter Oliver
Last time I visited, I was surprised that they'd managed to refurbish
and rebrand Airfare into something that turned out food that, although
it looked different, tasted exactly the same as it ever did.

Once again, I must say, the Airport, and Airfare were better.

The Arts Centre cafe is the main place I frequent now, which is happily
(I hope) still the arts centre café.

ME

[RjY]

Martin Eyles typed...

Post by Martin Eyles
Noooooooo. I liked Kaleidoscope as it was.

Post by Peter Oliver
Last time I visited, I was surprised that they'd managed to refurbish
and rebrand Airfare into something that turned out food that, although
it looked different, tasted exactly the same as it ever did.

Once again, I must say, the Airport, and Airfare were better.

Everything is better in the good old days

Even if well after the good old days it was exactly the same
Even if it was exactly the same BEFORE the good old days

The good old days weren't

[Tom March]

Post by RjY
Everything is better in the good old days
Even if well after the good old days it was exactly the same
Even if it was exactly the same BEFORE the good old days
The good old days weren't

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Neither's my memory, or else I'd be able to remember who said that.

-Tom

[Nicholas Jackson]

scripsit RjY ...

Post by RjY
The good old days weren't

This, essentially, is my objection to 1970s nostalgia. People who were
born in the 1980s don ludicrous trousers and absurd wigs, and spend
several hours gyrating to some of the most appalling noise ever to be
misdescribed as `music', labouring under the stunning misapprehension
that they're recreating some golden age in human history (or, at the
very least, that it's `fun').

I, on the other hand, grew up in the 1970s, and well recall how
unutterably rubbish they were. The music and fashion were atrocious in
the extreme, to a degree not heard or seen for centuries.

I remember getting home from school to find the house in almost total
darkness, lit by candles, because the local electricity board had gone
on strike. But that didn't matter, as there wasn't anything on
television, anyway, because the BBC and ITV had gone on strike too.
And even when they weren't, it wasn't much better because
there were only three channels, which weren't on all the time anyway
(BBC1 and ITV were on from about 9am until midnight, with BBC2
consisting mainly of Open University or school programmes, or
testcards).

And on the rare occasion you managed to find something to watch, it was
rubbish - sitcoms whose `humour' centred mainly around sexual harassment,
racism, and homophobia.

The whole sorry decade was then punctuated by the landslide election
of a Tory government headed by Margaret Thatcher. Which kind of sums
the whole thing up, really - it was such an indescribably bleak time
that millions of people felt that even being ruled by a party of rabid
barking lunatics led by a control-freak fascist nutcase had to be at
least slightly better than status quo.

One of the best things about the 1980s (and there really weren't that
many) was that between them they got us all a good ten years away from
the 1970s. It took Bros, yuppies, Roland Rat, puffball skirts and the
miners' strikes to do it, so it was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory, of course.

nicholas