Friday, 5:30pm, December 23rd
2016, Somewhere in the West of Ireland.
To you,
who doesn’t like coffee,
This might be a tad of an exaggeration, but coffee is probably
the most important writing tool there is.
I’m not here to condemn you, but rather, to answer what you’ve
been asking me and coffee drinkers alike for years on end: Why do you like
coffee, when it tastes like the soil of a potted plant that’s been beaten into
an ash tray?
Well, as I’m now on my Christmas holidays with buckets of free
time before me, and because I can never make a long story short, I will try to
answer your question with something more satisfactory than ‘because it’s nice’.
Maybe it’s the divine
stereotype of writers sipping coffee along the Seine. – If I were to place
myself in the nook of Au Petit Suisse, following a stroll
through the Luxembourg Gardens, I would definitely reach a higher word count,
than if I had no fondness for coffee to begin with, and therefore had no reason
to track down all of the cafés best suited for writing in Paris.
It’s the illusion,
sure. Coffee gives me the air of a busy person. My parents
noticed this illusion in the late nineties when they took
a trip to Milwaukee in the U.S and couldn’t believe the air of the busy people
around them who were bopping about with coffees to go. In Ireland, drinking
coffee had always been more of a sit down activity before the years of the
noughties, paired with a chat with friends and maybe even a kit kat bar. Coffees
in cardboard cups to go were unheard of.
But now, feigning
confidence in my ability to overcome the day’s tasks is so much more attainable
when I have a coffee cup in hand, because it looks like I don’t even have the
time to sit down and drink my coffee. I project the image of someone who is so
determined to be productive that they will fuel themselves with coffee whilst
cantering from Point A to Point B. If I can fool others with this façade, I can
fool myself, until it’s not even a façade anymore, and my coffee has morphed
into my own natural merriment.
Coffee is empowering.
Sometimes I think I
don’t even drink it to stay awake, because coffee is worth a lot more than its
caffeine. With every cup of coffee and every effort to stay awake, I fall
asleep, because staying awake with coffee brings me no comfort; Only too much
excitement that eventually burns out and lulls my brain to sleep. I drink
coffee for different reasons.
T.S Eliot gets it. He was the first
person to innovatively develop the idea of the ‘objective correlative’
in poetry, i.e attaching an emotion to a certain object or subject in a
symbolic way.
So, I don’t drink coffee just to stay awake when I’m tired.
Coffee is comfort, joy, and confidence - liquidized. The warmth on my hands is
like petting a cat. The smell could instantly cure a cold. I even find joy in
the hiss of the coffee machine, because it replaces the other sounds in my
head, like alarm clocks and deadlines.
And then there’s the taste.
The taste varies from my thoughts to yours.
Please remember that I will never think less of you for not
liking coffee, but it would confuse me to hear that you’ve never tried it in
its varying forms. To me, coffee is a socially acceptable way of drinking luxurious
cake batter that’s been toned down to the lighter end of the scale in order to
suits us ‘adults’.
It is probably the most important writing tool there is so,
what does it mean to you?
And don’t worry if hot chocolate is
more to your taste;
You can always add a flavoured syrup to your Americano, or just start
anew with a mocha. (Mmm… healthy! ;) )
Ciao,
Madame Mayreed x
