RECENTLY, feeling unusually adventurous, I entered the foyer of a cinema to see what films were showing.

There was no indication outside.

However, it was the same inside: nothing about films, just price-lists for a cafe the size of a concert hall and a long counter selling snacks and ices.

I thought it a peculiar one-off, typical of highly paid designers forgetting function. But, on visiting another cinema, I found the same arrangement.

Then I recalled a visit to an Edinburgh museum which had recently suffered a refurbishment, resulting in the boring old artefacts being bunged into the back-rooms while the floor space was taken up with a series of cafes.

We have become a cafe society. Interiors cannot contain them and they are spilling outdoors where, in Glasgow, a battle rages between bureaucrats and caffeine-dealing businesses.

The city council wants the latter to apply for full planning permission, with a fee of £400 for establishments seeking to seat their patrons outside, in full view of decent ratepayers.

Beyond that financial consideration, the issue has become a cultural stand-off between liberals and fuddie-duddies who look askance at outdoor cafes and shuffle home to open a jar of Nescafe.

I write as an enthusiast for glib generalisations. Some argue that you cannot look at a cafe's clientele and deduce they were all the sort of person whose first reaction to an atrocity is not sympathy for the victims but concern that the perpetrators get a fair trial (pretty fair working definition of a liberal, right?).

And I agree that it takes all sorts to make a cafe. But, for the purposes of this exposition, I prefer to deploy stereotypes. Outdoor cafes are for party people who are always texting somebody about something trivial like shoes or sex.

Cafe society is louche. It is laid back. It's not for the likes of thee and me. In Edinburgh, where I live, it's for the sort of people who enjoy the Festival. Outdoor cafes also attract bald, stocky men in sunglasses and shin-length shorts (why do all bald, stocky men dress like that? Is there a by-law? Is it genetic?).

Outdoor cafes are, in other words, trendy, even "continental". These are just two reasons why I'm uncomfortable walking past them.

But I'm not the only one. Citizens have complained about not being able to get past on the pavement with their buggies, bulging bags of shopping, or sometimes just fat bottoms.

Others object to the sound of mass slurping and the sight of whipped cream from fancy coffees adorning the upper lips and noses of unqualified quaffers.

How can Glasgow have continental aspirations anyway? It's like Portugal borrowing from Inuit culture. Glasgow should be Glasgow, not Monaco with puddles.

Philosophically, the issue is one of freedom-to and freedom-from. It's about freedom to drink coffee outdoors in an exhibitionistic manner against the freedom of innocent passers-by from ocular harassment and the sight in turn of trendy people en masse appearing smug and contented.

In a vigorous editorial, this newspaper backed the libertines against the forces of order and decency.

Reasonably enough, it pointed out that cafes will also have to pay, not just the planning fee, but charges for lawyers and architects.

But, as lawyers and architects are exactly the sorts who use such facilities, should they not provide their services free? Surely establishments could appeal to the altruistic instinct of lawyers?

I've taken this too far. Blinded by bigotry, I castigate entire sectors of society and resort to fantasies about kind lawyers.

But it's too late now: I refuse to retreat. In that Edinburgh museum, would I wish the cafes (indoors but in an outdoors sort of way) gone? Madam, I would.

There used to be just one discreet cafeteria, tucked away at the back behind the stuffed seabirds. I enjoyed patronising it, but that was back in the joyously dull days when there was only one type of coffee, which one might choose with a product made by leading Unionist intellectual, Mr Tunnock.

Today, cafes are letting it all hang out, like the exposed tummy of a fat lady in a crop-top.

But, just as there is no law stopping overweight people from exposing their abdomens on the high street, we cannot restrict public coffee-quaffing.

It is the price we pay for freedom.