Furry with Ruffles: Evicted from our Monday Meetup

Cartoon on page 4, The Voice Community Newspaper,
Saturday October 3, 2009

Thanks to the kindness of DH, I have been home scaring the cats these last four days trying to avoid coughing so hard that my eyes pop out - not fun! He claims to have got this wondrous bug from a cycling buddy during the recent On Ya Bike tour around New Norcia, Toodyay, Northam & etc. Not sure how you would actually ride with this but whatever. It's been a very eventful week even if I have had to watch it from home.

Monday - Public Holiday - was fine if a little scratchy in the throat. Went to knitting at Exomod Coffee in Mt Lawley as usual. Smokers outside - as usual. Complained - as usual. I got up to shut one of the shutters that was open - besides the smoke, it was a little cold and none of the staff seemed to be bothered. One of the other knitters also complains about the smoke as we now have a cigar smoker in the mix. There's an actual by law about this sort of thing and by January, there will be state laws so they must know that when they serve food - smoking's a no-no.

Inside Cover, The West Australian,
Thursday October 2, 2009

Next minute, short, swarthy, hairy man comes up, grabs the chair of my knitting friend and goes off, very loudly. "This is no community centre!" "You people never buy anything!" (We all had drinks, I just finished my sandwich and there was plenty of cake happening...it's a knitting group!) "You just take up space!" (That'll happen I guess.) "You're too noisy!" (What the...?) "We don't need your kind here!" (What kind was that? Human?) And then we were asked to vacate the premises.

As we left, we explained to anyone who asked what the issues were and why we were going - not to the girl on her laptop who had no cake, drinks or anything else and hadn't since I'd been there but she was quiet so obviously not 'one of our kind!'

Much tweeting and FaceBooking on the part of others (I'm allergic to either!) happened via various mobile electronic devices with many expressions of amazement on the part of respondents - we'd been going to this cafe as a group for around four years without a problem. Put up with a heap of bad service and substandard food on occasion because staff were new, yada yada yada. We used to be the only customers there most Monday evenings as I recall.

Now we've moved down the road to Caffissimo who looked like they needed a group of loud, uncouth people with pointy sticks and spinny things to see how we go there.

We've had some quite remarkable news coverage - Inside Cover in the West Australian picked up our story as well as the local rag, The Voice. And we got a cartoon in the later which is quite good. A FaceBook site dedicated to bagging this arm of the franchise has been set up. Heaven knows what will happen next Monday should I be well enough to go. Exomod may get a few queries asking where the knitters have gone. That'll make 'em happy I reckon. Stay tuned!