Fancy a coffee? Collinstown storyteller is looking for new chats

Eilís Ryan

Ronni Gurwicz, who lives in Collinstown, is looking to have coffee with… well, anyone who is prepared to sit down and have coffee with him!

The scientist, storyteller and handyman, has been sharing coffees with strangers for around six years now, with the target of getting to 1,000 cups – not for Instagram, not for TikTok – but just for the simple joy of connecting with people, and hearing their stories.

Now, Ronnie, who has been living here for two years, is turning his focus to people in Westmeath and Ireland generally, hoping for coffee and a chat wherever they want and whenever suits them.

The project began with a misunderstanding between two teachers in Sweden, where Ronni worked for a spell – one of several countries in which he has lived as well as his native Britain.

“For me, a lot of living and working is all about community, connecting with people. I moved to Sweden and I was like, ‘okay, I’ll be able to meet people. I’ll be able to develop a community’. But there’s something in the Swedish psyche and the way people are there, which is very… it’s a bit standoffish; they don’t want to get involved, and I really struggled with that.”

A friend he met there, Anna, American Swedish, who had moved back to where her grandparents had a farm, was having a similar struggle: “She thought it was going to be this beautiful idyllic story but she came back and she just found people were difficult to get in with, and so she and I would try all these different things to build community. For example, I used to have an open pancake breakfast on a Sunday morning.”

Sometimes that attracted as few as two people; sometimes as many as 30 plus. Ronni was working as a bartender; Anna, who had a boyfriend back in the US, was teaching. One day, on her way to work, a passenger on the same train spotted her work lanyard and revealing he was looking for a job at the same school, he asked for some pointers.

Because it was an early morning “quiet” carriage, other passengers hushed them so they exchanged email addresses and then agreed to meet for coffee the following Saturday morning. But when the man realised after the coffee that Anna was not interested in pursuing a romantic friendship, he became furious: “He started swearing at her. He said, ‘Who the hell do you think you are wasting my time like this? Inviting me for a coffee and then saying that it wasn’t romantic.’.”

Anna was reeling, because it had not entered her head that meeting someone on a Saturday morning to discuss work could be construed as anything other than a friendly gesture.

“So we were discussing that, myself and Anna, and we were trying to think, ‘what can we learn from this?’.

“And we started talking about this idea about what does it mean to go for a coffee with someone, and is there a world in which we can have chats and coffees with strangers, but with no ulterior motive, no agenda?”

Ronni moved to the US a while later – and this coffee question was, he laughs, still “ticking away” in his mind.

“And I thought I’d love to do some project which just involved that, just involved chatting to strangers with nothing else beyond the fact we’ll have a chat, and that’s it.”

Thus, “five or six years ago now” began the adventure: “It’s just pootled away in the background. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to have 1000 coffees with 1000 strangers, with no ulterior motive, just chats. And I’ve done over 600.

“I’m careful about the ‘rules’: like if there’s any other intention behind the coffee, then I don’t count it,” Ronni explains. “If I’m meeting someone for my business, if I’m meeting someone for a date, if I’m meeting someone for, I don’t know, catch up with a friend, I don’t count it. I only count it if it’s truly just chatting with a stranger, with, and no other motive.”

The way he usually meets people is that he has QR codes, and he would put them up in cafés and various places. Through the QR codes, people can send Ronni a message – or through his website, book a slot to share a coffee with him – whether virtually, whether in a café – or even picnic-style with coffee from a Thermos.

“In the beginning. I was only doing it in person. But then I started doing it online, partly due to Covid but also because, for a lot of people, there’s a fear about meeting a stranger.” Real life interactions have occurred in places as open as forests and as exclusive as in the dining room of the House of Lords.

There’s no cost involved – except the price of a coffee; like a priest, Ronni doesn’t share the details of the conversation; there’s no profit in it; it’s purely a social thing. Interestingly, three or four people Ronni has met this way liked the concept so much that they are now replicating his idea, including one woman in France and one in India. Ronni reckons he has physically sat down for coffee with people in around 15 countries, and those with whom he has shared coffee come from around 50 countries. The meetings tend to come to an end after around an hour – but he has had some that lasted less, and some that lasted longer. He admits it can be a bit awkward at the start: “What I have learned over the 650 or whatever it is that I’ve done is that in order to help people open up, it’s often me who’s doing the talking for the first 20 minutes, and then I shut up completely.”

That he has ended up fascinated with the world of stories is not what might have been expected of Ronni, who grew up in Newcastle and Manchester: “I studied to be a climate scientist,” he reveals.

“I did what’s called ecosystem analysis. That’s just the technical name for it, but in reality, it’s numbers, climate change, that kind of thing.”

It was while out in the workplace, that he found his interest broaden into the whole field of storytelling, and in his professional life, much of his work consists of helping NGOs, councils, businesses with how they can tell their story in a better way: “So here’s the thing, in the world of science, you have lots of numbers and people who have great ideas, but it’s all very technical, theoretical, and in order to really actually do the change with people, you need to translate that into human stories, and that’s where I come in.”

Not all human stories emerging from the 1,000 coffees project end when Ronni and his fellow coffee drinker part company: “I usually leave it in their hands. You know, if they happen to live up the road and then they start, I don’t know, inviting me to a hike or so – I do a lot of hiking, great.

“There’s some people who say to me at the start of the coffee, ‘it’s nice to have this coffee, but it’ll probably be a short one because I don’t have much to say’.

“But that’s not true. I promise you, have lots to say. And then after an hour, an hour and a half, you leave the coffee and you just think: ‘wow, this person, they’re amazing’. I think everyone has that in them, and it’s just often we don’t get the chance to talk about that a bit more.

“Obviously, with friends and family we do, but it’s with a stranger where it’s just completely neutral… And you know the vast majority of the 650, I’ve never seen again and never spoken to again. And for them, often it’s like just a neutral playing field. They can tell me things, and maybe they won’t tell other people. And it just leaves me, you know, shaking my head and being like: ‘wow, people are very cool, very interesting.’.

“I love it. I feel honoured.”