Brown's Café and Camp Coffee

It takes a while in any new place before you suss out the best places to go for a cup of tea and a bun.  Generally I try to avoid the big chains on the High Street - I'd rather give my hard-earned £ to a local establishment.  Besides, the big chains are just so achingly boring - the same fare pretty much in them all, and extortionate prices to go along with their baristas, flat whites and lattés.  I stopped drinking coffee a couple of decades ago so I never had to learn what all these new terms meant.  In my day, I just drank black filter coffee - much simpler!  One of the best and most reliable coffees, I'm a little embarrassed to say, was to be found in McD's.  I've no idea if that is still the case.  

Funnily enough the other day I found myself thinking about the coffee in the hospital in Bath I used to attend - the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases (see here).  When I first was an in-patient, in 1983, the only coffee you could get on the wards was this odd concoction which went by the name of 'Camp Coffee', which was a thick syrup that came in a glass bottle containing, I read, sugar, coffee essence and...wait for it...chicory.  You just added a spoonful to boiling water and in case you were wondering Yes it tasted as awful as you might expect.  I guess it made financial sense and England was always a nation of tea-drinkers so there probably wasn't too much complaining about it from the patients.  Besides, generally speaking in the UK it's a brave soul that criticises anything to do with front-line services in the National Health Service.  Managers and politicians are fair game but we all know that on the ground, in the operating theatres and on the wards everyone does their best, given the resources available to them.   And that last bit is, of course, the issue.  The last report from the Office of National Statistics shows that healthcare spending in the UK in 2017 was the second-lowest in the G7 group of large, developed countries and about the median in OECD countries.  My guess is that since then we've gone backwards in comparison with other countries and I doubt we're ever going to catch up without some radical reform.  And I'll leave any more thoughts on that for another time.

Back in Oxford, fortunately we happened upon the Covered Market, just off the main drag.  It's a treasure-trove of small, independent businesses - everything from hand-made soap to cheese shops and places to eat.  Brown's Café did us nicely for tea and a late breakfast:

Shadowy figures in the Covered Market.  OM4ti/85mm/HP5 via HC-110, on Adox MCC.

Brown's must be doing something right as they've been going since 1924.  I'll have to make sure to visit during their centenary - their apple pie looked the business. 

As you can see the shop next door sells fancy cakes and they did look rather special.  You can gawp through the window and watch them at work, as we did for a few minutes.  There was an older couple in front of us.  My wife told me afterwards the lady turned to her husband and said 'Why would I want to buy one of those when I can make one just as good at home?'.  The husband replied something along the lines of 'Yes, dear'.  Sometimes it's good not to be able to hear too well as I may have had difficulty keeping a straight face with that one...