Random Anecdote

Just while I'm thinking... & drinking about it...

How I Started Liking Coffee

My Father was a coffee drinker & I grew up with the smell of coffee being made in the kitchen several times a day. I always loved that smell - rich, steamy, kind of like chocolate, but not quite - enough that, of course, I was curious about this dark brown, hot drink, that Dad seemed to enjoy so much. When I was about 9 or 10, he let me try it...

I should mention, at this point, that it was always Nescafé Blend 43 instant coffee that he made, first with one teaspoon of sugar, then a few years later with one sugar substitute tab. By the time he offered it to me, it was with the aspartame tab...

I couldn't believe that something which smelled so good throughout my childhood, could taste so bad. Talk about a loss of childhood innocence! After that one sip, that was it - I hated coffee. That therefore, also went for coffee-flavoured cold milk, coffee-flavoured chocolates, anything that described itself as having a coffee taste, I wanted none of it. I still liked the smell though...

Fast-forward a few years to the point in my teens where I'm starting to take an interest in girls & wandering the maze of emotions, expectations, contradictions & confusion that comes with the territory. I'd fallen in with a group of friends that was made up of boys from my (all boys) high school & girls from a childhood friend's (all girls) high school. It was a comfortable group that survived 'til well after we'd all left school & gone to our various universities, colleges &/or jobs. None of us ever wound up 'with' each other... possibly because of the bond of friendship, possibly because one of those bonds was that we were all socially awkward in one way or another & could never articulate those sorts of desires & emotions with, or to, each other. Anyway, we'd regularly find ourselves in coffee shops & it became a standing joke that I'd always order a milkshake, while everyone else would have cappuccinos, or flat whites, but that I'd always run a finger across the froth of their coffee & taste that. Especially if it was a cappuccino with the sprinkled chocolate on the froth. This was the case, if not always the practice, well into my late 20s - though I had eventually stopped the finger taste testing, probably because a girlfriend (I did manage to have a few of those!!) had broken me of the habit

Fast-forward a few more years to my early 30s where, single again, I'd arranged to meet a girl I was interested in at a coffee shop - her suggestion I think &, of course, I agreed. This presented me with a dilemma. She didn't know me that well & might think it a bit weird if I ordered a milkshake, so it looked like I was going to have to order a coffee. My mind raced through what I knew about the stuff, trying to remember which one was the smallest amount I could get away with. Espresso... that was it!!! So I had an espresso, with a healthy dose of sugar, to kill what I knew would be a horrible taste. The things we do for lust...

It was wonderful!! Completely unlike the old instant stuff my Father drank... this wasn't 2 teaspoons of granulated chaff, drowned in water boiled in a jug & 'sweetened' with chemicals... this was made on one of those mysterious big machines behind the counter that rumbled & hissed steam. Now I knew what that machine did... so I ordered another, without the sugar this time, just to see if it was actually the coffee I liked, or just the sugar hit. Yep - it was the coffee after all. I don't remember who the girl was now, but I've always remembered that first 'proper' coffee... even after the thousands I've had in the last 20 years. So - no thanks to my late Father, who stuck with his instant goop for the rest of his life, preferring it to any of that fancy café stuff, but a huge, life-changing thank you to whatshername, for presenting me with such a significant fork in my road

I still hate instant coffee!!!

Please... Please, Let This Be The Turning Of The Tide...

Twitter has started putting fact-check links on The Great Pumpkin's tweets &, predictably, he's not happy about it... threatening to shut social media companies down, which of course, he can't do

It all stems from his rants about postal votes, which, somehow, in his fried cranial organ, he thinks will be abused by the Democrats & used for voter fraud, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But that's never stopped him spreading bullshit propaganda before, so Twitter have stepped in

And I love the hypocrisy... Well - I don't, but seeing this in print just makes me smile, albeit somewhat ruefully

"Further stoking the fire on the postal voting issue, Florida newspaper the Tampa Bay Times has now revealed that Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who has been defending her boss’s attacks on postal voting, has voted by mail in every single Florida election she’s voted in.

Ms McEnany defended her and the President’s right to vote by mail when asked why everyone else shouldn’t be allowed to as well.

“Absentee voting has the word absent in it for a reason,” she told the Tampa Bay Times.

“It means you’re absent from the jurisdiction or unable to vote in person. President Trump is against the Democrat plan to politicise the coronavirus and expand mass mail-in voting without a reason, which has a high propensity for voter fraud. This is a simple distinction that the media fails to grasp,” she told the newspaper.

Florida does not have absentee voting: you can vote by post prior to election day for any reason you like, a simple distinction some in politics fail to grasp."