Coffee

Everyone is giving up something these days. Even before this week’s flood of new year’s resolutions, we’re in the age of subtraction as people shed vices like old skins. Cigarettes, alcohol – those villains have been booed off the stage by the newly health-conscious, whose accusing stare is now turning to a fresh culprit: caffeine. Like most sanitising trends, the anti-caffeine narrative is biggest across the pond. ‘Decaf desirability’ is ‘peaking’, the New York Times told us last month, as turmeric lattes, mushroom elixirs and chicory brews threaten to knock coffee off its perch.

For most of my life, I was a night owl. Up-and-at-‘em types would tease me for my sleeping-in habits. I’d go on the defensive by saying, yeah, you get up at the crack of dawn, but you’re also in bed by dusk like a nerd, whereas I burn the midnight oil like some mad genius tinkering away with the romantic moon and my fellow nocturnal beasts. I preferred, until relatively recently, to work late rather than get up early to complete tasks. In college, I avoided 8 a.m. classes like Joe Biden avoids news conferences. But deep down, I always longed to be one of those people who was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed first thing in the morning, accomplishing half their to-do list before I had hit the snooze button for the third time. For years, I thought it just wasn’t in the cards.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Ten or 20 years ago no one would have thought twice about enjoying Nescafé or its equivalent. There is soothing ritual in spooning, pouring, stirring and sipping the mud-brown concoction in a mug. But nowadays, for a generation nourished on slow-roasted Colombian cashew-milk cortados, instant coffee seems as primitive as campfire cookery. I recently stayed at Brownsover Hall, a grand Gothic mansion house near Rugby: a place where you can sit for a whole weekend in a Georgian wingback chair, gazing out at Warwickshire. In a wood-panelled bedroom, with ceilings loftier than millennial expectations, by the mini kettle and the branded writing paper, was the familiar tray of Nescafé sachets, PG Tips and milk thimbles.

I have a deep-seated hatred of the hospitality QR code. It ripped through the industry as part of questionable social-distancing initiatives during the pandemic, taking the place of menus and human interaction – and has stubbornly refused to disappear, making my heart sink when I find one sellotaped to the table of a bar or restaurant. However, there’s one hospitality QR code that I found myself developing a fondness for – the one that comes with Pret a Manger’s coffee subscription. Launched in September 2020, the scheme is a financial godsend for coffee addicts.

Senator Ted Cruz has come under fire for saying that most baristas are slackers who spend most of their days sucking bongs. Now, Cockburn wasn’t always Cockburn. Like today’s youngsters, he had to mooch around working two jobs at once to pay the rent (after his parents cut off his allowance). So, when Cockburn says what he’s about to say, he says it with authority: Ted Cruz is right. It may be a hard truth but Cockburn has been there, done it and got the Grateful Dead T-shirt to prove it. The Texas senator said: ​​ There is a real risk if you are that slacker barista who wasted seven years in college studying completely useless things, now has loans, and can’t get a job, Joe Biden just gave you twenty grand.