Coffee Cycle Saturdays

James Harper

Hey there, thanks for clicking play.

I'm James Harper, and this is Filter Stories, the untold stories hidden in your cup of coffee.

And today, I'd like to share with you a story from a woman called Jules Walker.

Now heads up, today's episode isn't going to be an investigative deep dive into like the murky corners of the coffee world.

Jules' story is a personal story that kind of loosely ties to coffee.

And it's a unique story here in Filter Stories, because what I haven't done until now is share a story about a coffee drinker.

And in some ways, Jules Walker as the coffee drinker could have been me.

In fact, we were almost in the same place at the same time.

So maybe you don't know this about me, but about 10 years ago, I was just a regular old coffee drinker myself, working in London as a banker for my sins.

And it was in London that I fell in love with coffee, like to the point where the highlight of my day was running off from my desk in my frigid open plan office and bolting down the stairs and going into the fun, the energy, the flavors of my local cafe.

Then on my weekend, I'd be with my friends, finding little pop-up coffee stations, you know, under railway archers, or maybe by the side of a warehouse on an industrial estate.

And I loved it so much that I actually quit finance and decided to get into coffee, which ultimately led to me starting Filter Stories.

And Jules Walker was there on those industrial estates next to the coffee carts and underneath the railway arches, you know, waiting in line for her mom of coffee.

At the same time, I was.

It's amazing.

We never met actually.

And while this experience for me in London was so central to me, like leaving finance, leaving London and beginning a journey in coffee, for Jules, it helped her complete an inner journey.

And that's the journey I'd like to share with you now.

Here's Jules.

Jools Walker

I'm Jools Walker.

I was born in East London in the 80s, and I was born to two West Indian parents.

They came over from the West Indies during the Windrush generation to help contribute to the economy and building of the country, like the backbone of the UK.

And they both settled in East London.

Interestingly enough, my dad had one job when he came over to the UK.

He worked at the Ford car plant in Dagenham from the age of 19 until he was 55.

My mom's morning routine, it was very set.

So she would get up at 6 or 6.30. She would have her, if you can call it breakfast, her breakfast would be a cigarette and a cup of instant coffee, two sugars and black.

That's it.

My mom had various jobs.

She actually worked in like a processed meat factory.

When I was growing up in Canning Town, the most fun that I would have would always be being out with friends that I grew up with on the housing estate that was home, that still is home to this day.

And for us, it would be being out on our bikes.

So Canning Town isn't exactly the most green rich space in London.

And because there was so much redevelopment going on, you know, when we were on our bikes, anywhere and everywhere was a playground.

And we would also go to places like building sites, which I don't recommend for health and safety reasons.

Don't worry, we were always looking out for each other and help was quite literally around the corner.

Canning Town had a reputation as being a pretty rough area.

There were certain pubs that you knew you wouldn't step foot in because the National Front, a racist organisation, were here.

You'd get racist graffiti on the walls as well, anything ranging from the n-word, or if you were going to be called a wog, as in like a gollywog, a monkey, go back to where you come from, you know, go back to Africa.

I guess I was lucky in the sense that when I was a child, I didn't face anything extreme in that sense.

So, you know, there was a time when a headteacher at primary school knew that there was something was wrong because my mood had changed.

I wasn't as lively as I used to be.

I was kind of withdrawing when I was at class.

So she called for my parents to come in to talk to them about the change in my behaviour.

Yeah, that was the first first step, I guess, in understanding that something wasn't quite right with with little Julie.

I remember feeling really awkward.

I thought I was going to get in trouble, like I had done something wrong.

I had let some kind of side down by changing like that.

Do you ever come across people calling their depression the black dog or a black sheep that's just hanging around?

I describe my depression as being like sparks that are trapped inside of my head.

The way that I think of it is you've got all of these bolts of like electricity or blinding lights just going off.

And it's almost like there are too many signals going off at the same time inside of my mind.

My motivation for everything drops, absolutely everything.

And that could be from not feeling like I want to get out of bed.

I'm thinking to myself, it's just better to stay under the duvet.

There's nothing on the other side of this that I want to get involved with.

At secondary school, I was kind of like everybody's agony aunt.

You know, it's like to this day where people still affectionately call me Auntie Jules.

At school, I felt like I was very protective of my friends who may have been going through some tough times.

And then actually getting the nickname Sturdy Girl, because you could always rely on Jules.

Looking after others allowed me to push the thoughts of what was going on in my own head right to the back of it.

It felt a lot easier just to ignore them.

Or there were a mixture of reasons why I didn't seek professional help.

That just felt like it was a very grown up thing to do.

What child did I know who was going into therapy?

It just sounds like something that you saw on films or TV shows, the adults were going into therapy to talk through their feelings.

Like, you know, don't do that as a kid.

And especially in Afro-Caribbean backgrounds, culturally, you kind of don't talk about your feelings.

That's what I'd grown up around.

That's what I've known.

And that's how it was.

A day in the life of Jules cycling as a teenager would be getting that lovely trusty BMX that was a hand-me-down from my sister out of the downstairs cupboard.

Maybe riding over to Stratford, another part of East London, to go and see one of my best friends who also used to ride their bike.

And just spending summer days just kind of aimlessly riding around.

It made me feel amazing.

I'm smiling talking to you about it now.

It was just about hanging around with your mates on bikes.

No agenda, no nothing, just happiness and freedom.

Before it got too dark, get back indoors, stick the bike back in the downstairs cupboard.

My dad, he would watch all of the news.

So there'd be the six o'clock news would come on, he'd watch that.

And then at 6.30, the local news, he'd watch that.

The nine o'clock news on BBC One, he'd watch that.

And then the 10 o'clock news on ITV, he'd watch that as well.

So I'd sit down and watch the news with my dad as well.

And I was interested in current affairs and what was going on.

My parents were absolutely thrilled when I declared at a very young age that I was going to become a barrister.

I was kind of obsessed with watching programmes about law with my parents.

So my dad was a massive fan of a programme called Rumpole of the Bailey, which I used to love watching with him.

The other big thing as well was my cousin on my dad's side of the family, she qualified as a barrister.

And I thought she was incredible.

When I was at secondary school, you have appointments with career advisors, and you also do work experience.

So you get a work placement for a week.

And I remember my careers advisor at my secondary school not particularly taking me seriously at all when I told them that I wanted to be a barrister.

You know, maybe you should think about doing something that's better suited to your background and better suited to your academic levels.

And I'm like, what on earth is that supposed to mean?

I know academically I'm doing very well.

And what's the insinuation as to what my background is?

And the suggestions were clerical work, nursing, secretarial work.

You know, that was just her blatant attempt at trying to disguise saying black, like you're black, so you're not going to amount to becoming a barrister or having ideas above your station.

That's what the insinuation was.

After that meeting with the careers advisor, I felt like I wanted to cry.

I felt like trash.

When it became very clear a few weeks after the careers advisor meetings that I still hadn't had anything confirmed about a work placement being sorted out for me, that's when my math teacher stepped in.

Her husband was an immigration lawyer, and she managed to set me up to do a work experience placement with him.

It wasn't going to be me going off to like, you know, the Royal Courts of Justice or something in central London.

It wasn't going to be that.

And you know, she's apologising for the fact that something that wasn't her fault, she couldn't fix it, but she could offer some kind of solution.

So I was really grateful for that.

I'm not going to lie, there was also something, it felt comfortable to be able to talk to her about it because she was black.

I think she, now I think about it, probably really understood how hurtful that was for me.

A young black girl being told that, for all I know, she could have had the same thing happen to her when she was younger too.

I went and spent a week with him at his immigration law firm.

It was an incredible week.

Like, you know, even when I think back to it now, I have vivid memories of going with him to meet like, you know, some of his clients that he was taking on.

And that will always stay with me as a positive memory.

But I think it was when I actually started to study law, I realised I don't want to do this.

It's kind of too late now because we're on that road.

There's no left or right turn coming up.

We're just going straight down that road.

So, you know, it's like, right, I'll stick with it and see what happens.

And the compromise came when it was applying to go to university.

So I decided to do politics with law.

So law became a minor.

When I actually had those days when I was studying and I would open up one of my big thick tomes of a law textbook, the panic would set in.

What am I doing?

I'd be looking at it, I'd be taking the information in, and it just felt like it was just leaking out of the side of my head, like I'm taking it in and it's just going straight out.

But sturdy, sensible Jules is going to do this very sensible, serious degree because she's going to get a very sensible and serious job at the end of it, because that's what Jules is supposed to do.

And, you know, I didn't have the guts or the confidence to say something.

So I rolled with it.

So yeah, I'd finished university, like 2004, had no idea what I was supposed to be doing after uni at all.

And I accidentally fell into being an admissions officer at the University of East London.

Okay, cool.

Sturdy, sensible Jules will stick with this for maybe a year, maybe a year.

And during that time at this desk job, I can figure out what it is that I want to do next.

And then seven years later, my ass was still sat at that desk working.

So I met my now partner, Ian, when it was still weird to meet people on the internet.

We'd been chatting on an online techno music forum.

And then, you know, we actually met properly in real life.

It was quite clear that we fancied each other, there was a connection between the two of us.

And, you know, we got together, which was nice.

So when I got back into riding bikes, when I was 28 years old, I started up a blog to go with it called VeloCityGirl.

I love keeping diaries and journals.

And because this felt like a whole new chapter in my life, getting back on a bike after having not ridden for 10 years, I wanted to chart what this journey was about.

It was also important for me to have this blog so that other people out there who were like me, so other, you know, young black women could be looking at that and thinking, well, if she can do it, I can too.

Because I wasn't seeing that level of representation when I got back into cycling.

A typical day in the VeloCityGirl slash Lady Velo blogging land.

So there was a great day where we cycled from home in East London all the way over to Chelsea.

A friend of ours had a really lovely deli called Melegrano.

Hanging around in the deli and taking photos of it and being outside in the sunshine and posing with the pashley to take pictures was all glossy and beautiful and wonderful.

And, you know, I'd cycle back home with Ian.

And the first thing I would do would be getting my laptop and my notebook out and just making notes of everything that happened through the day to turn it into to a lovely blog post.

It genuinely was a nice day.

It genuinely was nice to share with the world.

It wasn't the whole truth, though.

Because obviously there were still other things going on with me, like, you know, secretly dealing with my depression behind the scenes.

But there were nice things to talk about.

So that's what I wanted to concentrate on with what I was putting on VeloCityGirl at the time.

My depression, I thought I had it under control because I wasn't letting my emotions show.

I was battling on.

I had bigger things to think about and to deal with to keep me occupied.

And I just thought I was doing a good job of keeping a lid on it.

So I think 2008, 2009 is where things got bad medically for my mum.

She was getting ill.

It was clear that actually going out to work was becoming difficult for her because of the various illnesses and comorbidities that she had.

It was terrifying.

It was really terrifying.

So, yeah, despite all of that, I thought, I'm good.

I'm all right.

I'm keeping a lid on it.

It's fine.

And it wasn't until that moment that happened in the kitchen.

Ian was with me that weekend, and we were doing the washing up together.

I was on drying duties.

So he was passing the dishes and stuff over to me, and I was drying one of the wine glasses.

And it was like all of my cognitive skills had just vanished.

I'm drying the glass, and it just flew out of my hand and smashed on the floor.

And the smashing of the glass just felt like me.

I just collapsed in a heap on the floor.

Thankfully, not in the glass, but I just collapsed on the floor in tears because it just felt like this is it.

This is the perfect example of how I'm feeling at the moment, that everything just suddenly stopped making sense and just smashed to pieces.

And that was when Ian knew the true extent of what was going on with me, because as much as he was my partner, who I felt like I could talk to about everything and anything, I told myself, the last thing he would want to hear and the last thing I would want to do on our weekends that we have together is talk about what's going on inside of my head.

So yeah, I poured my heart out to him on the kitchen floor.

And that was the moment when I realised I don't have a hold on this.

Even as an adult, I didn't seek professional help, because therapy costs money.

I think sometimes people forget the fact that it's easy to say to someone, go and see a therapist and talk these things through.

If you can drop 100 and something pounds an hour to go and see someone, I didn't have that.

I still needed something to bring the joy back into cycling for me, because privately, the love had gone.

And that was crushing, because cycling meant so much to me and had given me so much.

It was very wild to suddenly have no passion and no love and no desire for what was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me.

To be able to find that love and that joy again, I had to do it at a pace that worked for me.

Something, like I said, that didn't have external pressures from other people.

That whole thing of, you know, come out on a bike ride with us, you'll feel great, it will do wonders for your mood.

And it's like, no, because being around people is something I also don't want to do as well.

So I thought to myself, and Ian had thought this as well, maybe we just do something that's just us, that's slow and enjoyable.

Coffee cycle Saturday.

I enjoy coffee.

I love cycling.

And Saturday, as far as I was concerned, was the best day of the week to do anything, because then you can just chill out on Sunday.

Just cycling around London with a vague idea in our heads of somewhere to go to and finding a decent coffee shop.

The first very, very memorable coffee cycle Saturday was when we were going to ride from home in East London.

And we were going to head over towards Tower Bridge.

One of the big things in London on a Saturday was going to places like Borough Market.

But there was a sort of break off market like Maltby Street Market, that was a smaller, quieter version that we'd go to.

And Monmouth Coffee had their roastery there.

We had this obsession with eating doughnuts from St. John Bakery.

And then we would like pedal our bikes around to get to Monmouth.

And we'd sit down with our bikes parked up next to us.

And we'd find a seat outside.

And the doughnuts would be in a paper bag, rip the bag in half to make a makeshift plate.

And then there was the majesty of ripping the doughnut in half.

It was just rich and unctuous and just good.

And you're flat white, just sitting out in a Saturday sunshine.

That was the day.

It reminded me of what it was like when I was a kid and I used to ride around with my friends on my BMX.

That it didn't have to be laden with proving to the world that you were great at cycling or proving to the world that Lady Velo can do all these things.

Coffee Cycle Saturdays reconnected me.

It rekindled the love.

Bigger things that I never expected to ever happen from the blog came along.

So BBC World News wanted to talk to me about cycling culture in London.

Ended up appearing on Newsnight a couple of times as well, talking about cycling culture.

That was very strange.

I still think of Newsnight as that, you know, one of the news programs that my dad would have to watch, like when he would come home from work.

And he was so, so proud of me.

The words of my careers advisor definitely rang loud in my head whenever I did anything like Newsnight.

Then getting invited to be a guest on The Cycle Show and it led to a part-time TV presenting job.

Since starting VeloCityGirl, the TV presenting work that's come along, the radio work that I've done, the writing that's happened, going on to actually being able to call myself a best-selling author.

That's all lovely, not going to lie.

It's very nice.

But the germ of all of it feels like it was Coffee Cycle Saturday.

It set me up to allow me to rediscover myself again.

James Harper

Jools Walker is back in the frame, cycling, belonging and finding joy on a bike.

She's also a TV and radio presenter and a cycling advocate.

She's also the co-host of a podcast called Adventurous in Coffee, a show co-created by me, herself and Scott Bentley of Caffeine magazine.

And there's a link in the show notes to both the podcast Adventurous in Coffee and Jules' book.

I produced this piece and wrote and played the piano music.

And I'll be back soon with a second episode I'd like to share with you from the Adventurous in Coffee series.

Take care and I'll speak to you soon.