SHOCK news from our high streets this week, as it was revealed that Scotia Minor (SM) had the highest percentage of shop closures in the UK last year. Worse still, within SM, Leith fared most badly, prompting local shop-owners to discard their aprons in a marked manner and take to the streets, metaphorically speaking. They are sceptical of long-standing municipal chatter about pedestrianising Leith Walk and turning it into Edinburgh’s Las Ramblas, a natural successor to the tree-lining initiative that saw the thoroughfare dubbed the Champs eh Leithie.

However, in other fancy foreign-style news this week, it was revealed that coffee shops are booming, and it is this disturbing trend that I want to examine dispassionately before calling for the forcible closure of such establishments.

I jest, of course. Let a thousand flowers bloom (while others wilt). I will be quite candid with you here and say I’m not really a coffee shop person and pine for old-fashioned caffs where you could get a bacon butty and a big, ignorant mug of strong, heart-enlarging tea.

For the avoidance of doubt, I distinguish these from tea rooms, which were always a little effete, and which have also largely gone to the wall in the face of the coffeetisation of our high streets. Were Captain Mainwaring to return to Walmington-on-Sea (something we pray for daily in our religious cult), he’d find the Marigold Tea Rooms had gone the way of the Novelty Rock Emporium, replaced by a Costabucks dispensing cortados prepared by baristas.

My fond memories of old-fashioned caffs are tied up with books. There was one on the aforementioned Leith Walk that I used to visit after the book sales at McDonald Road Library, happily trawling through my haul. The other was on the Royal Mile, an ancient place reached by a rickety staircase up which I’d trauchle with a bag of second-hand volumes purchased in West Port. Settling down with a mug of tea, a bacon roll and a liquorice roll-up, you might think that I was happy. Of course, I wasn’t. I never have been. But, to be fair, I was less miserable.

I cannot think either, with the exception perhaps of the above mentioned, that the service was particularly friendly in such places. Generally speaking, you were served by the owners, who wished they’d done something better with their lives and had come to detest the smell of sausages fried in lard.

On thanking them for providing you with provender, rather than say, “Have a nice day”, they would reply “Shut up and sit doon.” I do prefer the “smile or you’ll be sacked” generation that serves us now, partly because many of these young persons are genuinely nice, apart from the ones who ask all the daft questions when you’re ordering coffee (grumpy, I suspect, because of repeatedly asking the same things of folk who just a want a coffee with milk in it). In caffs, no one asked: “Do you want ciabatta or baguette? Semi-skimmed bacon? A thick dollop of cream on the top of your big, ignorant mug of tea?” The most they’d ask is if you’d mind lifting your mug while they cleaned – with a three-year old cloth soaked in hazardous disinfectant – the remnants of the last patron’s meal off the Formica-topped table.

Life is all change, which is always bad until it settles down and seems OK, whereupon it is changed again. Presumably, high streets will continue in some form, preferably with more caffs and fewer de-caff coffee shops.

Not going to happen. So, I shrink with dread when a friend suggests meeting in a coffee shop. “Couldn’t we just sit on the wall by the municipal dump and drink out of flasks?” I suggest. “Don’t be silly,” they say. “Wouldn’t you prefer a burnt caramel frappuccino and a bannanie oan brioche toast?” Nope.