Welsh and Coffee Shops

I finally got around to reading Irvine Welsh’s The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs over the weekend. I’m not sure about the almost magical plot twist that appears midway through the book, and I’m not sure about the ending. But overall, I thought the novel was an interesting continuation in his body of work.

What particularly appealed to me was his riff about people who conspicously work in public. I’ve expressed my own ignorance of the allure of “working” in coffeeshops and Danny Skinner, one of the main characters in the novel, seems to share my irritation.

Skinner comments on how, “they say all self-righteously: I work from home. Do they fuck work from home, they’re in everybody’s faces; in cafes with their laptops, in the streets and on the trains barking into their mobile phones about orders, sales profiles and consolidated accounts, forcing us all to reference their boring shit. Soon there will be no division at all between work and leisure. Each shithouse will have a built-in computer terminal with webcam so that you need never be off-line or uncontactable.”