Café 3 Sixty

Bovey Tracey, Dartmoor

But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights.

Moby-Dick, Chapter 29: Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb

The hurried bundling of bags and boxes into the boot. The hustle and bustle. The hurl and burl, heave and ho, duck and dive, squash and squeeze, twist and shout of loading families into cars. We creep myopically through a Google cloud down unfamiliar roads, and dart along moor-side lanes into the unknown wonders of Bovey Tracey.

Noisily, we unfurl into Café 3 Sixty, all coats and hats and overlapping chats. Find a table. Pull this, push that. Who needs the loo? There’s one seat too few. Coffee orders buzz on the WhatsApp chat, and I retreat to the counter queue. Immediately, in that Whitsun moment, all sense of being in a hurry is gone. I breathe, and smile.

And into this sudden calm, through unfocused eyes, shoot crystals of rapid spreading memory. I’ve been here before! I whirl around. We came through a different door, from another path – that’s all it took. We biked off the moor and arrived battered and splattered. I can almost see us there by the window, deep in coffee and paper maps.