Sunday at the Florist Pub

Creative Writing at the Florist Pub, a photo by olliefern on Flickr.

We came in from the heat and sat down at a corner table covered with cowboy comic strips from the 50s. A man in the corner played a trumpet until a basil-scented pizza on a platter arrived for him from the kitchen.

The girl behind the bar wore lipstick that was slightly too red for her face - as vivid as the cowboy's shirt on the comic strip. We rested our drinks on the cartoons - beer, lemonade, Coke - and pulled out our notebooks and pens for a spontaneous creative writing exercise brought about by hours of talks on literature and art in a nearby park.

We were grateful for the fresh breeze that came into the pub from all the open windows.

After the trumpetist was done with his pizza, he picked his instrument up again and was joined by a man at the piano. We stopped our writing to clap every time they completed a song. Then we were back into our pages, the cartoon smiles from the American Wild West peeking at us from underneath our notebooks. More people arrived and the clink of glasses from the bar counter, and the chatter from outdoor tables, rose whenever there was a pause in the free jazz.

Vicky said we could be in Italy.