This is a blog I wrote in October 2013 about the idea of The Business Cafe, it captures the moment I came up with the dream of building this concept, the 28th October 2013.
There is something delicious about an Autumn day when the country is emerging from a storm (Twitter #UKStorm) and trains were cancelled until 11am and the workforce of Surrey and other counties are brought to a beautiful stand still. Tweets abode from the working population about staying in bed, meeting a friend for a coffee, a chance to go to the gym during the week. It is clear that people would love to live and work locally, the desire to sit on a commuter train is not very high in anyone’s emotional drivers. Yet we all do it, thousands of us leave our town and hunt and serve in the cities, and what was the cost to the economy of this halted workforce?
Today, the 28th October 2013 I find myself with a day to dedicate myself to writing down the vision I hold for a local Business Community that can connect you to other ‘local’s across the world through a virtual community. If ever there was a day more poignant to do this this is it.
So, I did do my emails in bed, I did go to the gym, I did walk the dog with my son and have lunch in a park café, and I did walk down to a café to work. All of this was achieved in the 3 hours that I would have spent on trains and tubes, yet now, I sit refreshed and ready to work and energized by the local life I have just thrown myself into. I have not missed the trains.
I walk with my bag to the Café Nero at the bottom on the street I live on. I grab a mug of tea, I sit down, smile at a gentleman sitting near me, with a laptop, he doesn’t smile back. I feel like having a chat, he clearly doesn’t. I unpack my bag and realize I have left my laptop at home, a ten minute round trip. I ask the gentleman if he could keep an eye on my tea and jacket, he nods his head, indicating that I am total pain, but reluctantly he doe sallow me to run off.
It is weird, as I walk back up the road, I think about the fact that he is probably another business-man, part of the Surrey Ecosystem of business yet, we are in a café, not a ‘Business Café’, we are not encouraged to ‘network’ here.
I return, he looks up and does offer a smile, I sit in my little world, behind this laptop and I type. This introduction to my day is so normal, so relevant and so perfect. I have loved it.
It gets me thinking about a more local life and all the people like me who rush out of Farnham to the cities and leave behind the community we love
