The spare chair

Imagine a café with one table left. A person asks whether they can sit there for a while. Before answering, the proprietor wants to know what they intend to accomplish. It is an excellent question for a grant application and an odd one to ask of a chair.

I would like a few places where a person does not have to present a satisfactory account of what they are doing. Reading half a book, making an untidy drawing, or waiting for an appointment ought to be sufficient. Even looking out of the window should survive a fairly rigorous audit.

This is a preference about how a place is run, rather than a claim that everyone needs the same sort of rest. Some people want a conversation; others would find an unexpected conversation a reason to leave. A spare chair cannot settle that disagreement, but it can avoid settling it in advance.

The trouble begins when every available space acquires a prescribed purpose. Put a sign saying “creative work” over the table and you have made a small promise to one visitor while quietly excluding another. Put a sign saying “relaxation” over it and someone may begin wondering whether they are doing that properly. I am suspicious of furniture that assigns homework.

There is a serious objection. An empty chair does not pay rent, and somebody still has to clean the table. It is easy to praise generosity when the expense belongs to an imaginary proprietor. A café cannot offer an unlimited room, or unlimited attention, simply because the invitation sounds attractive.

That objection changes the proposal. I am not asking a café to conceal its limits. A clear closing time, an honest price, or a rule about how long a table can be occupied may be fairer than a vague welcome followed by resentment. The useful distinction is between setting a boundary and requiring the visitor to justify their existence inside it.

A reading room might offer a seat until six. A small café might reserve its larger tables for groups during lunch. Those arrangements can be explained without pretending that every minute spent in the room must improve its occupant. The proprietor has responsibilities; the visitor does not thereby become a little development project.

There is another difficulty: a place that never asks anyone to move can become a place that nobody new can enter. Hospitality includes the person still standing at the door. Sometimes the kind thing is to ask for the chair back, politely and with enough notice that the request does not feel like an accusation.

What I want, then, is fairly modest. Tell people what the room can offer, tell them where that offer ends, and leave them some freedom about what happens in between. If the result is an afternoon with no good anecdote attached, I would not count that against the furniture.