The Canterbury baristas are right: laptops and cafe society don’t mix

In Canterbury, the city that nurtured such hostelry-haunting characters as Christopher Marlowe and Patrick Leigh Fermor, a popular café has taken back control of its tables. Henceforth, laptops are banned from Fringe and Ginge on Northgate Street.

It wasn’t just that the keyboard-tapping of remote workers quelled the cheerful buzz of conversation, but that some laptop-wielding table-hoggers seemed to have mistaken the place for their own home office, demanding that the owners turn off the music, so that they could make their Zoom calls in peace.

If your work demands to be conducted in solitary silence there is – as Alfie Edwards, the co-owner of Fringe and Ginge, pointed out – no shortage of places to find it, from libraries to rented office space. Cafés, meanwhile, are about bringing people together.

The concept of a café as a place in which to find not just a restorative snack, but intellectual nourishment, has a distinguished lineage. The Café Procope, which opened in Paris in 1686, attracted literary patrons such as Voltaire and Diderot. The idea of an establishment where you could hang about chatting, reading or writing, while making a single coffee last for hours, spread across Europe and beyond, proving particularly attractive to writers, with their neurotic need for gossip and company to offset the solitude of their comfortless garrets.

Problems with café culture set in when writers became tourist attractions. Jean-Paul Sartre and his companion, Simone de Beauvoir, kept such regular hours at the Café de Flore, holding court as though in their private salon, that they became one of the sights of Paris.

For wannabe literary types, it was a short step from gawping at celebrity authors to imagining that taking up residence at a table with a long-lasting cappuccino and a Moleskine notebook was the secret of literary success.

The lingering post-Covid phenomenon of working from home spawned yet another mutation of café culture.

The same reasons that drove impoverished 19th-century writers from their garrets – warmth, company, the need to escape domestic distractions – found office workers colonising café tables.

They might be engaged in nothing more creative than emailing Trevor in accounts about a mislaid invoice, but the chore acquired a dashing whiff of bohemianism when carried out in the kind of surroundings where Hemingway or J K Rowling plied their inky trade.

But conviviality is the essence of a thriving café – not an arid hush, interrupted by the one-sided drone of Zoom calls.

“We wanted to take hospitality back,” said Ginge and Fringe’s owners – and quite right too. Let the Zoom-obsessed laptop-tappers depart (though not to the library, where hush – fertile, rather than arid – is essential).

Proustian interventions

A survey commissioned by President Macron on smartphone use by children in France has published its report. Pointedly titled “A la recherche du temps perdu”, it proposed restrictions to protect children from becoming “merchandise” in the tech market.

On this side of the Channel much political rhetoric has been devoted to the search for past educational times, when kiddies went on nature walks and read proper books rather than gazing at their screens.

But in the absence of the brisk French authoritarianism in cultural matters, it is intriguing to imagine what title a similar Anglo-Saxon report might have: Decline and Fall? Or perhaps just Down with Skool.