The old lady with the pink patch in her otherwise pure-white hair gave me a dirty look and sneered. I'd obviously caught her in a mood, and when I made the mistake of saying, ‘I don't suppose you serve proper coffee?’, she let me have it.
‘What do you think? This is a coffee shop!’
It was not the ‘come hither, take a load off response you'd expect from an old lady in charge of a small, cluttered café in a small, uncluttered coastal town in the middle of nowhere. But Lynne Crawford, she of the pink highlights and dagger eyes, wasn't in the mood for sweet-and-warm country-bumpkin stereotypes.
Nonetheless, I found a seat at one of the tables in the cheerful little road-facing courtyard of Lynne's Village Bistro and tried to coax some comfort from her Maltese poodle, apparently deaf and just as disinterested in tourists as Lynne. Perhaps if I'd ordered bacon instead of coffee.
But proper coffee it was, at least by small town standards, and Lynne,
