Nothing impresses me more than watching a person—or even just knowing a person—can do good work calmly and clearly despite all the complex, difficult, and emotional storms around them. Sometimes I wonder if it’s an integral part of some people’s personality—a skill that cannot be learned. The world may be on fire, but this type of person clears a space within the inferno and gets down to it.

As I look out the window, past the Tom Clancy paperbacks and the dying cactus, I think about the famous New York traffic controller with their white gloves, elegantly directing traffic, taking charge of an impossible tangle of aggressive emotions and powerful machines. It’s a cliché often realized as a kind of poetic dance in films, but the metaphor remains. The solid personality, the public face of government administration, the soft arm of the law, keeping the blood pumping through the veins of the city.

I’m sitting in one of London’s remaining ‘real’ cafés, just north of Camden Town, run by an Eastern European grand-dame. She seems to have mothered children into her seventies and, by all accounts, does the table service, coffee making, cooking, and hosting herself. The café is dressed in a palette that presents itself as burgundy whichever way you look. Book covers become burgundy, a painting of a sunset over a Mediterranean town glows with a burgundy haze, all the woodwork, the cheaply upholstered seats, and even the 1970s menu covers—covering menus unchanged since the 70s—are a rough, deep, brown-red. The place is stuck in perpetual dawn, suspended between night and morning.

Looking up from possibly the worst poached egg in the world—white bread, watery egg, a lettuce leaf, a cold tomato slice—I notice the mat my breakfast debris rests on. Its pallor contrasts sharply with the dawn (or sunset) implied by the rest of the interior. It depicts a French village street scene in a longing, faded Wes Anderson gouache style, probably painted in the 1980s, worn down by thousands of unsatisfied hands. All the placemats in the café are the same. When I was young, I always wondered why placemats sold together were always identical. Surely that was a missed opportunity. This small, strange experience probably foretold a suspicious relationship to pictures generally: sequential monotony, missed chances to display original art, and so on. I avoid the obvious fantasising about who this anonymous artist is or was.

The image is so faded and worn it is mostly patina—a texture formed through the natural use of the object over its lifetime. The recorded passing of hands, the dents made by cutlery and sauce bottles. Mini rituals, repeated over a lifetime, often feel more important than grand ceremonies dedicated to gods. They are a humble echo of stone steps worn into dips, or sculptures polished by the touch of drunk tourists, but here the ritual is from one mug of tea to the next egg sandwich.

Beyond the chaos of blobs, splats, and spots, the scene appears to be a gently lolling country town, probably in Provence. Probably in the afternoon—at least as most Brits imagine Provence, where time seems to pause around 3pm. The weather is neither sunny nor overcast; it’s just blank. The café’s faded billiards sign reads “Dame Confection” over a slightly dark, suggestive alley. It’s a melancholic pause instigated by a door left ajar. Tables are set outside, awnings stretch overhead, flowerpots on window sills hold upright, alive blooms—or perhaps wooden crafty replicas. Dirty wine glasses squat on the tables, and water cascades over a cake-decoration-style fountain. But unlike my café, the scene is empty, a dead landscape, not a soul around.

The lady of my café begins a long FaceTime call, probably with a friend rather than a relation, as it’s difficult to imagine such patience with family. Four builders come in, followed by another son, then a man, older. The builders order sandwiches while the waitress—owner, cook, and host all in one—pauses between phone nods to take their order. One hand on a child’s head she pivots, ballet-like, into the kitchen. She rests the phone beside the industrial toaster. One hand operates the fear-inducing silver boiling water spout, screaming its high-pitched note as tea mugs are filled. The older man talks to the child; the builders talk to each other. I ask for the bill. Two well-dressed tennis players enter, carrying big bags, striding across the café with impudent gait.

One of the pleasures of being in a café early is watching it fill, each person entering their day in their own arrogant way. Morning, more than any other time, seems to bring out the worst in people. Each feels most important in their world, vying for attention, staking a claim, asserting their right to demand.

The waitress parries the conversations with nobility, deftly progressing through the next ten minutes. I myself raise and lower my first finger, as if to indicate I have somewhere important to go—which I definitely do not. I start thinking seriously about the ‘important’ tasks I have to complete that day. Could she not understand my pressing appointments, the significant artistic contribution I am going to make to humanity?

Five minutes later, I find myself walking up the grey, slimy street toward my flat. The post has arrived: a letter from the taxman asking for another grand. Next door, the builders have started an extension the size of the house itself. No offers for work in the inbox, only time-wasters, desperate emails begging me to review underpants, Amazon delivery updates, and gallery responses that misunderstand my original messages—it all amounts to an anxious, 21st-century irritation. Balancing on top of this mound of faeces, how am I to start drawing? How can I put it all aside to begin something that earns no money, takes time, and is difficult?

Rather than face it, I pick up my phone and look at the last picture I took: the placemat, the mottled empty street. At the back, a tiny stick figure stands with a rectangular object in front of them. It can only be one thing—the artist, sitting calmly in his storm, zen-like, ignoring the torrent of brown bruises around him. Unaware of the ugly marks, he carries on with total clarity. A true plein-air painter. Strangely, I had never considered that plein-air painting might actually be difficult—with the weather, the people asking irritating questions, the performance aspect—but here he is, patient, organized, and focused, possibly painting the very scene depicted on the placemat—the scene now firmly imprinted in my memory.