This is no beach café (aka 'porridge in a paper cup')

Day four - Saturday 13^th September 2025

Two paper cups sat on the green wooden coffee table. One held tea, the other was filled halfway with slightly gloopy porridge.

I stared at my breakfast. It wasn’t what I’d had in mind, but let’s face it, none of this was.

I’d woken early in the sparsity of my allocated parent room, got up and cleared my things into our family locker before popping across the corridor to check on our sixteen-year-old son in the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). The night nurse beamed at me.

Good news?

He’s slept all night!

All night? Really?

Literally, even before all this, when was the last time that happened? Relief and hope seeped through me as I crept away, leaving him sleeping in their care while I wandered the echoing corridors, down to the lobby to find breakfast, my tastebuds springing to life with comforting thoughts of hot latte and almond croissant.

Arriving downstairs however, I found only hushed darkness. Everything closed. It was early, and, foodwise, we were hospital novices - we’d only really had two full days in this one and kept getting blindsided by canteen and café closing times. Soon, the overwhelming kindness of others would flood in: food parcels, freshly cooked chilli, homemade pizzas, curry and easy snacks. But that morning I was alone and had nothing that could reasonably be counted as edible let alone nutritional.

I made my way back up to the PICU family room, rummaging through their freebie shelves and finding the cupboard rather bare, save for a few slightly crumpled packets of instant porridge. I made one up in a paper cup and hunted down a plastic fork.

Admittedly, it was a little grim, but even this was a gift to my hunger and I found myself thanking God for it. This place. A gift I will never forget.

Here was a parent bed just across the corridor from the room where medics were calmly, expertly restoring my son’s life. A shower. Tea. I was beyond grateful. Nothing else mattered but to be there. To be halfway ok.

As I ate though, I couldn’t help thinking what a far cry this was from the idyllic beach cafés I’ve been writing about. I laughed at the irony, took a photo in each direction to record the moment as ‘Definitely not a beach café’.

Because, for the past couple of years, in between ‘proper’ work projects, I’ve been writing about beach cafés. The restful healing moments I’ve spent in them. The thoughts and stories they’ve triggered about meaning and vocation and ‘just being’.

Stories of failing to reach all the achievement markers and milestones in life. Stories of understanding and learning to accept where we are.

Before all this happened, September had been set aside to pull all this together and possibly submit it somewhere. But now, in the light of everything else happening, that felt like the most frivolous and irrelevant thing.

Like, ‘Who actually cares? Literally, how could that even matter?’

And I thought to myself:

Forget it.

Forget the beach book. Nothing matters but this. How could I have ever thought otherwise?

Then I noticed something.

At either end of the room hung paintings. One, a square of deep turquoise, boats bobbing in the evening sea, a shoreline chapel glowing light across the water. The other, a more specific beach scene. Tables and chairs at the water’s edge. And the title in handwritten script below:

‘Seaside Café’.

In this place, so far removed from the sea, at this time when everything normal was an impossibility, here was a reminder that it will be a 'yes' again one day.  The joy of it can still exist within this moment. A glimmer. That life is still there and we will get back to it someday.

The book of Ecclesiastes says there is a time for everything. Maybe that’s the thing.

A time for beach cafés and a time for ‘porridge in a cup’.

A time - this time - for being on the outside of normality, looking in.

And while beach cafés may seem frivolous when faced with the gravity of a hospital ward, there is still something there. In a tired, joy-hungry world, someone is creating a space for joy and rest. Someone creating beauty, the kind of beauty that goes hand in hand with sustenance.

That quiet morning, those paintings held an answer for me. Normality is out of reach for now, far in the distance, only a mirage. But these things are still there, like a promise that we will get back to them.

The sight of that paper cupful of porridge, its flimsy plastic fork sticking up in the solid concrete mass of gloop, was so grim it made me laugh. Such a far cry from those waterside cafés. But instead of sadness, all I could feel was incredibly grateful.

A slightly ropey breakfast could be no breakfast at all. A functional thin-blanketed bed could be no bed at all. What if I’d had to drive here every morning? The fact is, for those first days, I didn’t even want to step outside of the hospital doors. I wanted to be as close as possible all of the time, and this room, this porridge in a paper cup, was allowing me that.

My cup overflows.

(metaphorically, at least).

You can feel sorry for yourself that things are far from perfect, or you can be grateful that they’re not worse. Because the rescue we received there was the biggest relief. The limitless care, the love of God shining through others. The other things will return later. This is what matters now.

A time for everything.