Coffee break

I gave up coffee a couple of weeks ago. I won’t pretend it was easy. The physical withdrawal began with a blinding headache accompanied by creeping nausea. My limbs turned rubbery, and I was reminded of when Winston Churchill cruelly compared Ramsay MacDonald to a Barnum’s Circus freak dubbed ‘The Boneless Wonder’. I felt just like The Boneless Wonder, but with my head trapped in a vice. This feeling lasted for more than a week. I could have fixed it with a single, swift flat white, but I chose not to. This time, coffee and I are over.

I can’t remember exactly when I became so addicted to coffee. It crept up on me, like it did on the rest of the country. As a child, from the age of four, I drank tea, little steaming cups that punctuated all the parts of the day not spent in school. There was a whole language to tea. If you had a row with someone in the family and then later you said, ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’, it was a sign that you were sorry. If they accepted, they had forgiven you. If they said, ‘No thank you’, they were still angry. It couldn’t be that they just didn’t want it. No one ever didn’t want tea.

Coffee had no language. If someone refused coffee, it didn’t mean anything: maybe they really didn’t want it. Coffee was mainly instant, and its smell — that earthily intoxicating blast that rose up when you popped the seal on the jar — promised more than the taste delivered. I could take it or leave it. Its superior forms were for special occasions: when guests came, the good, ground stuff emerged along with the ceremonial coffee plunger.