Meathman's Diary: Spilling the beans on the morning coffee run

Trimgate Street on a bright Tuesday August morning, the sun is climbing above the town's jagged mishmash of rooftops, the dawn shadows quickly receeding as the early starters get about their business.

Car parked, it's a short stroll to Chronicle Towers.

Chekhov’s, as usual, is busy, the window seats occupied by the ever curious, plotting their day while staring out over porridge and tea.

The chap in Gardener's Choice is out early too, setting out his bedding plants and flowers, pushing those summer sales, it's a growth business after all.

There's friendly chat wafting out of Connolly's fishmongers along with the smells of the sea as the first of the fresh catches are snapped up. Tierney's newsagents is seeing a brisk trade too.

There's trucks in loading bays, men pushing pallets and the clock, unloading supplies, keeping the wheels of retail moving.

Crossing the junction with Kennedy Road at AIB, another familiar sight, the county council worker, bedecked in orange hi-viz, ever busy and wielding his litter picker like Gandalf's wand magically making the detritis from the night before disappear. He's having less luck vanishing the gulls, who squawk around Market Square, swooping and hollering and looking for any titbits left behind. They think they own the place.

A cursory morning 'howaya' is exchanged with the council chap as we pass each other, but then we're both stopped in our tracks.

The typical morning familiarity and routine is broken by a heavy 'splash' sound as a car passes from Kennedy Road on to Market Square. In the middle of the road in front of us, a coffee cup bounces across the asphalt, the lid gone rolling in another direction. The lamentable latte is now a caffeine-infused Jackson Pollock painting dashed all across the road while the car it came from heads on down Watergate Street and out of sight.

'Dirty b*****d' mutters the council worker.

'Did he just throw that from the car!?' asks I.

'Yep, the dirty b****d', says the worker again, retrieving the discarded cup and lid in jig time and putting it in his black bag.

'The dirty b*****d', says I.

We're not wrong.

It's hard to fathom the mindset of someone that could just launch a full-ish cup of coffee from a car window in the middle of a busy-ish street and drive on without a care in the world. Harder still to think that it may have been launched by someone with the shocking entitlement that the council worker was there and 'sure, he'll pick this up'.

Anyway, lowering our eyebrows from the incredulity, we nod our heads in mutual disgust and go our separate ways, there's work to be done after all.

Across the Square and past the Bull, there's the usual two or three early morning regulars huddled on the little wooden chairs outside Ode, putting the world to rights over espressos and cappachinos.

I'll grab an Americano of my own before heading inside Chronicle Towers hoping that the next boiling hot coffee that car driver gets ends up in his (or her) lap... dirty b*****d!