I live in a rather cafe saturated area, which is a novelty for me as, back in Canberra, the only food or beverage provider accessible by foot was the Page Tavern, a place you wouldn't enter without a hepatitis vaccination and some thick soled shoes. The choice really is endless, from tiny places staffed by cheery hipsters endearingly clad in ruffled aprons, to serious grown-up places where the bread comes with olive oil and there's a stack of Vogues and In Styles by the door, to somewhere called 'The Sensible Sandwich' where the sandwiches are, indeed, sensible and I've heard they do a mean schnitzel.

But the place I favour is none of those things. It's rather, well, bland, all late 90s chocolate feature walls, vaguely South American background music and cold, flabby slabs of frittata in the lunch cabinet. It's almost as though someone has taken the Australian Tax Office's downstairs cafe and transplanted it into the middle of Melbourne. Still, for some reason, I am fiercely loyal to this little cafe, partly because the staff are friendly, partly because it's close to my house, partly because they do a mean soy latte, but mostly because it is my muse. Whenever I've found myself stuck in a writerly way I go down to my beloved, rather naff cafe, order a coffee the size of an infant's head, and get to it. It always works.

Anyway. A while ago one of the friendly girls who works there, a woman with an array of beautiful but puzzling tattoos wound around her forearms, asked me my name. I told her and she repeated it several times so she'd remember. I was chuffed. This meant that I was now A Regular. I'd be wander in of a morning and I'd be one of those people they all greet by name, and they'll make 'the usual' and crack lame jokes about Mondays and so on.

A few weeks passed. The woman with the tattoos did, indeed, greet me with a name every time I came in, but it took me a while to fully parse that she was not saying my name. She was calling me Anne. Somehow 'Rachael' had metamorphosed in her memory to 'Anne.' I was hardly offended. Hey, brains are tricky things, and she has a lot of regulars to remember. But then I realised that all the staff were calling me 'Anne.' In this haven of oily pressed foccacias, dry muffins, pan pipes and Dulux Chocolate Truffle I was no longer Rachael, I was Anne.

I'm not about to correct them. I feel as though Anne is my alter-ego. Whenever I walk down there I try to get into Anne's head, thinking what will Anne say this morning? How did Anne's weekend go? Will Anne have the blueberry friand or the muesli slice? Sometimes it's a bit nice to start the day as someone else.