Kiwi Cafe

Rejoice! I'm now old enough to nostalgise over simple things in a manner I used to mock!

It's more and more difficult to meet up with certain friend groups. We're all of a certain age, one is married, three of them prefer to go running, one of us has radically reshuffled their socialising schedule to stay sane, and all but one of us are currently working^[1]. We met up last week, for the first time since December. And I know that it can get worse than that.

Plenty of good chats were had. Irish pubs are fabulous for this, and I would be much worse off if I didn't have access to them. Peak discussion was the debate over an electric heated butter dish. Real engrossing stuff, the kind that causes uproar in a way that's tough but fun to articulate.

We later turned to the area where we lived in college. Supremely close to all the main campus building, with a shop around the corner that sold renownedly good hot chicken rolls^[2] for bargain bin prices. Right next to it was a small unassuming cafe that did an understated trade in breakfasts. It was surprisingly nostalgic to think of its existance and disappearance.

We were served full Irish breakfasts for under €5, in a time after a crippling recession but just before the country once again lost its mind. As with the little things and the big things, us young lot didn't appreciate what we had.

You will not find Kiwi Cafe on a map, or on any internet search. It existed as anything before 1990 did - in a more transient way, something that could disappear without a trace, and only your memory keeping it alive. This got me thinking a bit more seriously.

I have a general passion for keeping archives of specific things. Things that would be lost from the internet once they lost their profitability metrics, or life-saving things that would be purged by zealots as a show of moral grandstanding. I view these things as genuinely useful and worth preserving. Up until recently, the internet was perceived to preserve everything - every single photo taken, every location on a GPS map, every tweet sent. I assumed that we were to drown in this increasingly meaningless sea of information.

The sharp swerve of the modern internet towards walled gardens, and AI slop hoovering up everything it can find, has forced a reckoning. The assumption that you can find anything on a search engine is increasinly disappearing. Cloud providers, having removed their triple-backups for reduced costs, are at greater risk of dropping data without warning. And people are generally more aware of the futility of everything being online, even if the pushback against it isn't as powerful as I'd like.

I took an odd enjoyment in knowing that Kiwi Cafe was overlooked by this tidal wave of information. It lives on as a silly little tale we tell ourselves in the pub, remembering when we were much poorer yet could afford food so much easier. Idle hangover chat about the night out before, or maybe the next one. That's all it needs to be. I don't need 50 pictures on a hard drive, or on the cloud, that will never meaningfully be used. I can just let it go, and let the transient memory do its job for me.

Was it actually good food? Not really. I can still taste the salt.