DIGITAL SLACKERS: Easycome, Easygone

It might be some sub-species of deja vu. You're crossing the street, or putting your key in the door, or watching the streets roll past the bus window, and you suddenly feel that one day, years from now, you'll recall this insignificant experience in all its details, and feel divided from it by a great gulf of time. It's a vertiginous, melancholy feeling. It happened to me a couple of weeks ago, sitting in the Trafalgar Square branch of Easyeverything at 6.30am on a Saturday, with the Strand as empty and hazy as a country lane in 1913. I was there to view an online video of an interview with a film producer to whom I was scheduled to talk later that morning. I'd tried to watch it at home, on my own narrowband connection, but that could only bring me a syllable at a time. The 24- hour internet cafe opposite Charing Cross station was the most logical solution.

I've always liked these places. I like writing in them, away from the easy pleasures of the telephone and the biscuit tin. I like the way the management has put a sandwich bar in every branch, and then pinned signs on the wall declaring, "No Food or Drinks in This Store", in combative, capitalised Times New Roman. I like the way that, in spite of themselves, they have become a network of urban community centres, somewhere between Lyons Corner Houses, doss houses, poste restantes, cruising grounds and office blocks. You can run a small business from here, and your clients will assume that you're lolling in some grand pad with a backlit aquarium and a cappuccino machine. You can sit in the warm at 4am on a Tuesday morning, and nobody will ask you what you're up to. You can even indulge in a snooze: despite the notices that warn, "No Sleeping Allowed." The day shift and the night shift are two distinct groups of people. During office hours, customers are as bright and purposeful as the lines of telephonists you see in 1930s musicals, trilling things like "requisition department please!" to a syncopated rhythm. At less sociable times, they suggest that moment in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves wakes up to find that the human race has been drugged senseless and potted in ranked vats of amniotic gunge.

The dramatis personae on my row of terminals that Saturday morning were typical after-hours types. A Japanese backpacker in a bobble hat, furiously typing and retyping an email, unable to find the right words. A spotty boy, just disgorged from a club, logged on to a gay dating site, scrolling quickly down each new page, so as not to display the photographs of the tumescent fortysomethings of his desires. A bald man agitating a pot of yogurt as if it were a Shaker- Maker, but giving no indication of wanting to eat its contents.

At the far end of the row, a tangle-haired bagman in a sour cloud of body odour, passing the time by pretending to surf, and eventually giving up, allowing his head to slump on to the melamine. Somewhere out of view behind the low walls that divide the lines of screens, two Ulstermen pursuing a spitting argument: "Masonic referees," insisted one, "are a well-documented fact." On my way out, I noticed the sheet of A4 gummed to the glass door, informing customers that, as from 17 March, Easyeverything would cease to be a 24 hour operation. The night shift has handed in its Berocca-orange baseball caps. Now, every midnight, the screens go dark.

It's the first sign I've noticed that the Internet cafe is slipping away into history. When PDAs are as common as novelty ringtones, and we all carry wireless offices in the pockets of our Nehru suits, what would stop Easyeverything going the way of the Wimpy bar and the telegraph office and the rag and bottle shop? Imagine yourself, in 50 years time, trying to describe them to someone too young to remember. They were places where people paid a small, hourly fee to sit in rows, tapping at grubby keyboards. They were places where you could send email and drink bad coffee. They were places that gave London's lost ones somewhere to kill the small hours; the means to meet new faces, or to send a message to the people they'd left behind, saying: "Don't worry. Don't look for me. I feel fine."

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