Ten years ago, I started getting migraines. They were so bad that when one struck, I babbled nonsense, couldn’t speak, type or write. The swelling in my head, which caused the migraine, was pressing on the language department of my brain. Once recovered, I was confused for days, repeating words three or four times in a row and not quite understanding what was being said to me.
This all had to stop immediately, as communication is key to the smooth operation of my life. It was suggested to me that coffee is a common migraine trigger and if I was looking for a culprit I ought to start right there. I immediately cut out the black stuff and the migraines stopped. Now I have perhaps one migraine a year – if that – and my family can go back to just plain ignoring me, rather than not being able to understand me.
Yet a side effect of cutting out coffee is that I have become very aware of the absurd, bordering on hilarious, cult of coffee. It must be what it is like to be sober and to regard, with blinking incredulity, how parasitically interwoven alcohol is with all aspects of modern life. Breakfast: Bloody Mary. Lunch: pre-prandial sherry, wine. Dinner: cocktails, wine, digestif. All other times of day: beer. But alcohol isn’t quite everywhere in the way that coffee is. A coffee at 9am on the train is normal, a Bloody Mary perhaps less so.
A traveler from past times would assume that coffee is the new religion and coffee shops are temples to this holy and mighty bean. There are so many bloody coffee shops! I met a man in Greece this summer who is moving to England to help his cousin set up a new coffee chain. I’m afraid I laughed out loud when he said this. I asked him what this coffee chain was going to do that all the others don’t and he simply shrugged and said, “It’s a good one.”
OK, pal. The only coffee chain worth a damn, in my view, is Redemption Roasters, which employs ex-offenders. But do you know what? This new Manchester-born coffee chain will probably do well. Because we just cannot get enough coffee.
Can this all still be the fault of the TV show Friends, which depicted its characters sitting about making jokes in a coffee shop? It seems to have percolated (excuse me) into the DNA of all living people, and thus all their offspring, forever, that the apogee of living is making quips while drinking coffee. This is so acknowledged as fact by the world – even by people who have never seen Friends – that when you are not a coffee-drinker, it looks like a cult.
I think some people’s entire days turn on coffee. Anticipating their coffee, getting their coffee, drinking their coffee, feeling sad once the coffee has gone and then wondering when they can have their next coffee. My family and I were once walking in a remote wood in the English countryside and two men came by, holding paper takeout coffee cups. How? Why? Why so much coffee?
Coffee, by the way, is surely making us all fat. The calorie content of a flat white with whole milk is 150 calories. Larger, blended coffee drinks with syrups and so on can pack in 700 calories. And it is making us poor, draining little chunks of capital that could go towards something useful, rather than something that will make us able to complete tasks very fast (but not especially well).
The other day I was dithering over whether or not to buy an expensive face cream. Then I did some math and worked out that over the last ten years, even if I only had one coffee per working day, at roughly £4.30 ($5.80), that would mean £10k ($13,500) just spent on coffee. I bought the face cream.
My husband is already highly-strung, but after six espressos he is completely uncontrollable
I live with a coffee addict, so I do understand – a bit. My husband, Giles, can’t function without a vat of coffee, made at home without ceremony in an ugly thermal coffee pot and consumed between the hours of 9am to 11am. When we were first married we were given a Nespresso machine, which was a lovely and smart little thing, but the ease with which Giles was able to access strong espresso was catastrophic: he would drink five or six in a row, arriving in the kitchen in an increasingly manic state in order to smack the little flashing green coffee-cup icon button, which released the thick bean-juice, accompanied by that juddering, grinding noise so distinctive to the coffee-pod machine.
My husband is already highly-strung, but after six espressos he is completely uncontrollable, yawing about the place with his hair standing on end. I gave the machine to my friend Connie. But Giles isn’t a day-long slave to coffee. After 11am, the coffee-mania ends and there’s no more coffee until an espresso after dinner – maybe – if he’s in a restaurant. Even a loony-tunes coffee nut like Giles doesn’t require the sheer number and range of coffee shops that stuff up our high streets. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him buy a coffee from a coffee shop unless it was an emergency.
The fault lies, of course, with economics. The gross profit margin on a cup of coffee is huge, anything from 65 to 85 percent. Coffee is also addictive. If you want to make money, sell coffee. No one is to blame, really. But it’s so weird.
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