The other protesters, a gang of self-important hipsters, were hauling signs of their own. Theirs were a little less amusing. They showed photos of barefoot, half-naked black kids, standing by coffee bushes, the children staring bleakly into the camera, eyes dewing over with tears, as if they had just felt the foreman’s lash. Saunders had seen it before, too often to really get angry, to be anything more than irritated, even if those signs perpetuated an outrageous lie. Jimi Coffee didn’t use kids in the field and never had. In the packing plants, yes, but not in the fields, and the plants were a hell of a lot more sanitary than the shantytowns those kids went home to.

Anyway, Saunders couldn’t hate the hot little hipster girls, in their stomach-baring Che Guevara T-shirts, or their fashionably scrungy, sandal-wearing boyfriends. They protested today, but in three years the hipster girls would be pushing baby carriages, and the half hour they spent in Jimi Coffee gossiping with their girlfriends would be the best part of their day. The scrungy hipster boys would be shaved and chasing jobs in middle management and would run in to Jimi every morning on the way to work for their all-important double shots of espresso, without which they could not make it through the most boring day of their lives since the day before. By then, if the hipsters allowed themselves to think about the time they had picketed to protest the arrival of Jimi Coffee on British shores, it would be with a bemused flush of embarrassment at their own pointless and misplaced idealism.

There had been a dozen of them in front of the hotel the night before and two dozen in front of the flagship store in Covent Garden in the morning, at the grand opening. Not great numbers. Most passersby never so much as glanced at them. The small few who did take note of them always flinched at the sight of Uncle Sam with his rubber prick hanging out, the thing twitching back and forth like the great fleshy pendulum of some perverse, surreal grandfather clock (grandfather cock?). That was all anyone would remember—Uncle Sam’s strap-on—not what was being protested. Saunders doubted that the marchers would register as anything more than a single sentence at the end of a minor story buried in the business section of the Times. Possibly someone would be quoted about Jimi’s business practices, practices Saunders himself had helped to develop.