For years people have been talking about how a European-like caf\u00e9 society would be a good thing to change the English drinking culture.<\/p>\n
Perhaps. But have you noticed just how many bars, coffee shops, and restaurants are already sticking tables and chairs outside ? Which is all very well,\u00a0except<\/em> when they don’t use their own property but start blocking the public\u00a0thorough-fair.<\/p>\n Now I don’t object to tables and chairs outside – I’m very partial to sitting down in a shady spot outside with a good book and watching the world walk past; if that shady spot happens to have waitress service with endless refills of coffee, so much the better. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this.<\/p>\n And the wrong way is to put the tables and chairs right outside the shop door and so force pedestrians walking past to make a detour. This is annoying enough on it’s own, but gets a whole lot more annoying when you are forced into the street and dodge the traffic, or forced into the centre of a pedestrian precinct out of the shelter of the shops – and so get drenched.<\/p>\n Do it properly, or not at all!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For years people have been talking about how a European-like caf\u00e9 society would be a good thing to change the English drinking culture. Perhaps. But have you noticed just how many bars, coffee shops, and restaurants are already sticking tables and chairs outside ? Which is all very well,\u00a0except when they don’t use their own […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-7-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-Cc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2368"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2711,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2368\/revisions\/2711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}