Candida Crewe

On a trip to Italy via Paris last month, my travelling companion and I went to the Gare de Lyon at sparrows to catch a train to Rome. We badly wanted coffee. I came to coffee late in life and am infantile and uncool in my love of frothy buckets of what is effectively a hot coffee milkshake. It is almost all about the milk, preferably whole and organic but, at the very least, fresh. So it was that Starbucks – which uses conventional milk in the UK – twinklingand open in the middle of the freezing station, made the heart lift. I recognised in my childhood that the French did everything better than us except for two things: loos and milk I took one sip and nearly spat it out. That inimitable taste and stench of UHT, or ultra-high temperature processed milk, made me heave.