It helped immensely that the KAFO crew spoke flawless English, though I still tried to use Polish as much as possible. Polish people are remarkably generous when you attempt their tongue; they will earnestly insist your accent is almost perfect even when it is disastrously far from it. It is a fiercely difficult language, but not impossible for grasping the essential courtesies. Inside KAFO, I knew I had a linguistic safety net. For complex thoughts or long conversations, the staff would seamlessly switch to English without a shred of judgment.
Except for one team member, of course.
He was a gentle, deeply funny guy and a passionate Francophile who refused to give me an easy out in English. With a bright twinkle in his eye and a playful laugh, he drew a hard line: Polish or French only. And so, it fell upon my dusty schoolboy vocabulary and old family holiday phrases to bridge the gap. I could manage the weather and place my basic order in Polish, but anything further required me to dredge up whatever dormant French remained in my memory. It became a highly entertaining daily battle. I would summon every ounce of French I could muster, navigating the linguistic tightrope until those inevitable, humbling moments when he would look at me, laugh, and ask:
“Gary… tu n’as pas compris ça, n’est-ce pas ?”
Guilty as charged. The look on my face in those moments must have been as blank as a fresh Toulouse-Lautrec canvas.
Linguistic battles aside, he was also the undisputed master of the best tray-baked granola I have ever tasted. I had just one single issue with him: his absolute refusal to change the soundtrack. The man loved to play Kate Bush’s debut album, The Kick Inside — ad nauseam.
The record player sat prominently on display in the back room. I never actually asked if I could use it; there seemed to be a strict, unwritten rule that vinyl selection was a staff-only privilege. There was a wide, fascinating selection of records to choose from, but looking back, I can’t recall a single one of them other than some experimental 1970s Polish jazz and Kate’s album. Now, I’m not averse to Kate Bush. She is an undeniably legendary and highly talented artist. But she is just not my cup of tea.
I honestly have no idea how many hundreds of times I sat there listening to the familiar, soaring numbers of “Wuthering Heights” or “The Man with the Child in His Eyes”. All I know is that to this day, if any part of those tracks plays on the TV or the radio, I am instantly teleported straight back to that room in KAFO. I’ll be sitting on the low sofa, looking at my bowl of incredible granola, thinking: Goodness no, please no, not again.
On reflection, perhaps he was simply trying to make me feel a little more connected to my first language.
Even so, given our daily sparring, I’d have much preferred to listen to the warblings of the little sparrow, La Môme Piaf. A rousing rendition of Édith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” would have been a far better soundtrack — and put a proper French slant on the whole affair and would have been a perfect, unapologetic soundtrack for his brilliantly stubborn, “listen or leave” attitude at the turntable.
Eventually, he moved on — first to Gdańsk, and later, so the story went, to a top-tier fashion house in Warsaw. I could never confirm it, but there was a quiet style to him that made the rumour entirely believable. Places like KAFO are rarely about permanence; they are about the brief, vivid characters who pass through, leaving behind a trail of incredible coffee, stubborn rules, and songs you can never quite unhear.
Ghosts to Carry, Stories to Keep 