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I once spent three hours in the Pumpkin Cafe on Crewe station with a hangover you could sell to science, just watching the steady stream of businessmen, homesick students, and bow-backed pensioners come and go. It was nobody's destination and yet everybody ended up there. It was the perfect place to be utterly mindless.But what about Christmas? I rang round a few branches to see what it's like serving people at this time of year. "The station's busy at Christmas, but people are usually just so focused on getting home or doing their shopping that we can get a bit quiet," says the man from Exeter St Davids' Pumpkin Cafe who answers my call. "It's an alright time to be working, when there aren't any delays—as soon as anything bad happens people get a bit annoyed."Britain's Pumpkin Cafes are the liminal, transitionary stop gaps that everybody's been to but nobody thinks they know. None of us asked for it, but it's what we all deserve.