NAIL IN THE COFFEE

This morning I ordered an Americano instead of a Latte. With hot milk for prolonged rapture. And it made me wonder where this is going. I’m guessing the next step is drop the milk. Then add an extra shot (whatever that is). Then two extra shots, then three, four - I don’t know, what’s the maximum? When do they pat you on the shoulder and say ‘I think you’ve had enough son’ and alert the security staff to see you off the premises?

For years I held out against coffee. It was tea all the way, the comforting and benign ritual of bubbly water on herby pillows. The aural equivalent of a hot bath - every half hour. Because that’s the thing about tea. It’s such a non event that you just keep doing it. Not so much a drink as a periodic change of texture. In those days the coffee drinkers were a dark and mysterious under-class. Masters of the infernal filtering apparatus that summoned forth the pungent black liquid of their desire. I treated them with suspicion, nay disdain.

ALHAMBRA

I stand frozen on a Soho street corner transfixed by a terrible quandary.  Tourists and trendies flow around me regardless, as my mind goes back to Granada in Spain twelve months earlier.

We were taking a tour of the Alhambra palace and fortress.  All around us hoards of social media junkies slavishly digitised every inch of the decor to re-create it on Facebook for the benefit of friends and family back home. And I was transfixed by the almost tangible torrent of data rising into the cloud from that parched hill. So many images of the same thing taken from the same angle, the only difference being the visage that places itself in the foreground and smiles triumphantly as if to say: This is it. I’ve done it. Finally I’m here.