I became sick of bakeries when I lived in Berlin. I alternated between a few of them, doing most of my work in a café-bakery in the then-trendy Neukölln district amid other somewhat directionless snackers and typers. After a while, I felt that commercial premises hawking cakes, pastries and cookies were no place for the would-be scholar, as I then was. I began to feel grossed out by other people’s crumbs under my laptop, depressed by the pressure, partly caused by my own boredom, to keep ordering and paying for cake and coffees. Eating cake began to seem antithetical to serious work, not its handmaiden. Eventually I discovered the charms of the Berlin State Library, where my then-boyfriend always stationed himself, and never looked back.

When I returned to London, I moved my office to the British Library’s Rare Books Room and kept it there until the library all but closed down in October 2023 after hackers destroyed its digital systems. To this day I am reluctant to place my laptop anywhere that sells food.

But perhaps the era of straightforward £4 flat white bakeries is over. A new breed of café seems to be trying hard to close the irksome gap between small-treats consumerist crumbs on the one hand and intellectual industriousness on the other. It’s as if cardamom buns and brownies have........

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