Read Online Meet Me at the Cupcake Café by Jenny Colgan - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jenny Colgan
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juice café in her little shop? She meant, Issy corrected herself, the little shop. The little hidden shop, in the little secret square that never seemed as loved and cared for as it should be. Of course, she knew, knew completely that having a shop that was hard to find and tucked away was far from ideal. Very.
Something struck her. She was used to working in commercial property where space went for fifty or sixty pounds a square foot. She eyed up the shop. Plus there was a basement, the sign said, which doubled the space straight away. Issy did some quick calculations in her head. That made it about fourteen pounds a square foot. OK, obviously this was in a London suburb, and not entirely a posh one at that. But still, twelve hundred a month – say eleven hundred if the woman was right and could negotiate a discount, which in this market she should be able to. If she could take out a six-month lease on that to do … well, to do something. To bake, maybe. Now she didn’t have an office to offload her experiments on, her freezer was filling up and she was running out of storage. Just last night, a particularly fine peanut butter and Nutella cookie recipe she’d invented had overflowed her very last Cath Kidston cookie tin. She’d had to eat her way out.
Issy closed her eyes as the bus came round the corner. That was ridiculous. There were millions of things involved in working with food, not just taking on a rent. There was health and safety, and food hygiene, and inspections and hairnets and rubber gloves and standards and employment law and it was completely impossible, and stupid, and she didn’t even want to work in a café.
Linda nodded over to the woman standing outside the shop, who was pontificating loudly on the benefits of beetroot.
‘I don’t know what she’s going on about,’ she said as they boarded the 73 together. ‘All I ever want in the morning is a nice cup of coffee.’
‘Hmm,’ said Issy.
The redundancy course, although it wasn’t called that, any more than it was called the ‘spat-out old losers club’, was held in a long conference room in a nondescript building off Oxford Street in full view of the Topshop flagship store at Oxford Circus. Issy thought this was very unfair in the scheme of things, a tantalizing glimpse of a life now out of reach.
There were about a dozen people in the room, from the bullish and sulky-looking, who gave the impression they’d been sent on this course as a kind of detention, to the utterly terrified, to one man who was digging in his briefcase and smoothing down his tie in a manner that made Issy suspect that he hadn’t told his family he’d been made redundant and was still pretending to go to work every day. She half grimaced around at everyone. Nobody made a friendly face back. Life was always easier, reflected Issy, when you were carrying a large Tupperware full of cakes. Everyone was happy to see you then.
A woman in her fifties with a tired, impatient face arrived on the button of 9.30, launching into her spiel so briskly that it rapidly became clear that the only people overworked in the current climate were redundancy resettlement trainers.
‘Now, starting your positive new life ,’ she announced, ‘the first thing you must do is treat job-hunting as a job in itself.’
‘Even shittier than the one you’ve just been ousted from,’ said one of the young men with a belligerent sneer. The trainer ignored him.
‘Firstly, you have to make your CV stand out from the two million CVs circulating at any one time.’
The trainer spread her lips in what Issy supposed was meant to be a smile.
‘And that’s not an exaggeration. That is the approximate number of CVs being submitted for available vacancies at any given time.’
‘Well, I’m feeling empowered already,’ muttered the girl sitting next to Issy. Issy glanced at her. She was glamorous and perhaps slightly overdressed – with jet-black ringlets, bright red lipstick and a
Something struck her. She was used to working in commercial property where space went for fifty or sixty pounds a square foot. She eyed up the shop. Plus there was a basement, the sign said, which doubled the space straight away. Issy did some quick calculations in her head. That made it about fourteen pounds a square foot. OK, obviously this was in a London suburb, and not entirely a posh one at that. But still, twelve hundred a month – say eleven hundred if the woman was right and could negotiate a discount, which in this market she should be able to. If she could take out a six-month lease on that to do … well, to do something. To bake, maybe. Now she didn’t have an office to offload her experiments on, her freezer was filling up and she was running out of storage. Just last night, a particularly fine peanut butter and Nutella cookie recipe she’d invented had overflowed her very last Cath Kidston cookie tin. She’d had to eat her way out.
Issy closed her eyes as the bus came round the corner. That was ridiculous. There were millions of things involved in working with food, not just taking on a rent. There was health and safety, and food hygiene, and inspections and hairnets and rubber gloves and standards and employment law and it was completely impossible, and stupid, and she didn’t even want to work in a café.
Linda nodded over to the woman standing outside the shop, who was pontificating loudly on the benefits of beetroot.
‘I don’t know what she’s going on about,’ she said as they boarded the 73 together. ‘All I ever want in the morning is a nice cup of coffee.’
‘Hmm,’ said Issy.
The redundancy course, although it wasn’t called that, any more than it was called the ‘spat-out old losers club’, was held in a long conference room in a nondescript building off Oxford Street in full view of the Topshop flagship store at Oxford Circus. Issy thought this was very unfair in the scheme of things, a tantalizing glimpse of a life now out of reach.
There were about a dozen people in the room, from the bullish and sulky-looking, who gave the impression they’d been sent on this course as a kind of detention, to the utterly terrified, to one man who was digging in his briefcase and smoothing down his tie in a manner that made Issy suspect that he hadn’t told his family he’d been made redundant and was still pretending to go to work every day. She half grimaced around at everyone. Nobody made a friendly face back. Life was always easier, reflected Issy, when you were carrying a large Tupperware full of cakes. Everyone was happy to see you then.
A woman in her fifties with a tired, impatient face arrived on the button of 9.30, launching into her spiel so briskly that it rapidly became clear that the only people overworked in the current climate were redundancy resettlement trainers.
‘Now, starting your positive new life ,’ she announced, ‘the first thing you must do is treat job-hunting as a job in itself.’
‘Even shittier than the one you’ve just been ousted from,’ said one of the young men with a belligerent sneer. The trainer ignored him.
‘Firstly, you have to make your CV stand out from the two million CVs circulating at any one time.’
The trainer spread her lips in what Issy supposed was meant to be a smile.
‘And that’s not an exaggeration. That is the approximate number of CVs being submitted for available vacancies at any given time.’
‘Well, I’m feeling empowered already,’ muttered the girl sitting next to Issy. Issy glanced at her. She was glamorous and perhaps slightly overdressed – with jet-black ringlets, bright red lipstick and a
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