Air
i.
You can’t divide yourself completely from outdoors, even in winter, because the café has to be understood to be open. In a dark building where the walls are painted black and the windows aren’t large, it helps to leave the door open, even though the cold air rushes in and so you stick close to the espresso machine at one end of the counter, or the grill at the other: both hot in a familiar, reliable way, like farm animals. In summer they will become your enemies. But in the winter, bringing in the signposts at the end of your shift makes your hands so icy - they’d simply slip out of your grip if you wore gloves - that you run to the grill, minutes after unplugging it, and rub your palms on the still-warm metal lid.
In this kind of weather, a hand-knit jumper is invaluable, especially when it’s made of wool.
ii.
Knitting teaches you that homemade always trumps shop-bought. The ‘Ikea Effect’ refers to the higher value that people assign to anything constructed by our own hands - even if you’re comparing flatpack furniture to the craftwork of a master. Working as a barista you go through a phase of resembling the most obnoxious kind of parent, behaving as if no one has given birth before in the history of the universe.
iii.
My least favourite customers are the ones who deride the vegan milks, even calling it “foreign muck” and expect me to stand there and smile, as if I can’t spin it into gold. As if I will serve up crap that I don’t stand by. But wool, I can’t help but stan. Yes, anything will warm you up if you stack enough layers but wool is alchemical. If wool is cocoa, acrylic and polyester are sachets of Options hot chocolate.
iv.
Although, wool has a hundred faces. There’s the soft, smooth merino that you buy to knit a vest for a newborn baby or a hairless cat. There’s sturdy Icelandic wool that leaves a hint of lanolin on your fingers. The roughness of certain kinds of wool only makes me love her more. It’s how you know she’s doing her best. It’s how you know she isn’t lying to you.
v.
We can take wool and milk from cows and sheep but you start to think, the personality of each creature as an individual is coded into these substances and though you are the manipulator of both materials, you can’t manipulate away that bit of soul. You are being haunted by life.
vi.
I am on the outskirts. The animal is at the centre, the rock that breaks the water’s surface. I can feel the ripple move into my hand.
vii.
The Icelandic wool jumper is thick and substantial like a big sandwich. At one point in its construction, you had to unravel half a sleeve and put it away in a basket where you couldn’t see it before you started working on it again. You were angry at the jumper for the mistake you made. With coffee, there’s that pesky entropy that makes each drink impossible to unmake, like heating wool to a felt, where the fibres cannot be unpicked. But you work on your flat whites, aiming to put a slim lid of foam on top of that unassuming body.
viii.
Steaming milk for a cappuccino or latte, you aim for a silky texture. I’ve always struggled to reconcile the adjective “silky” with the material that’s called silk, but although it may not make sense to me texturally, I know intellectually what is being described: an evenness and regularity of surface that silk inarguably possesses. Silk, the prodigy that is useful and even and lustrous already from the moment it emerges from the cocoon. Silk, with its name that’s absurdly close to milk, moves like water.
ix.
It’s the butterfat in milk that allows it to turn into foam and hold those bubbles of air so evenly, with such nonchalant confidence. Conversely, the lanolin in wool feels greasy but isn’t a fat at all because it doesn’t contain glycerides. Things aren’t what they appear to be: fat can be light and create light.
x.
Foaming milk is applying heat to make space for air within the milk. In a coffee or a jumper, its air that makes the difference - trapped within the crimps in wool, air makes it reliable, sturdy as a wall that the cold can’t penetrate.
Words by Ariane Parry
Art by Hannah Robinson