An extract from the upcoming Mitchell and Webb book, this one on the sadomasochistic joys of being a coffee drinker..
How to cope with coffee
By David Mitchell
I've always wanted to like coffee. I love its smell. But its taste is as disappointing by comparison as that of freshly cut grass. Also, it gives me a headache. For many years I tried to join in: I wanted to be a coffee drinker - it's deemed cool without being modern, which is the only sort of cool I'll ever be able to get away with. It's lightly but glamorously bad for you, which is the only sort of "bad for you" I have the courage for. It keeps you awake, but not like a next-door neighbour with a more active social life than you (I don't necessarily mean sex). But my palate isn't having it.
And this leaves me excluded from a very enjoyable aspect of western society, for, to many, coffee is much more than a drink - it's a hobby and a status game.
The hobby takes the form of a quest, to find "a decent cup of coffee". Apparently, most of the coffee that is served - and it seems to me that coffee is everywhere - is indecent. Coffee fans are always moaning about the coffee that is available to them and looking for opportunities to seek out, or, in the media world I inhabit, "send someone out", for better examples.
On the face of it, it seems illogical for people to have allowed themselves to become so attached and addicted to something that, in the only form they consider it palatable, is in such short supply. Other things that are so relied upon - cigarettes, chocolate, water, bread - are widely available in acceptable forms. Addicted smokers do not moan that they can only ever get hold of Silk Cut or Marlboro Gold when in fact the only thing they really relish developing cancer with is an obscure Turkish brand of cigarette only available in big Waitroses.
Similarly, other things that are as difficult to source as "a decent cup of coffee" - such as oysters, asparagus, truffles, musk and ambergris - are seldom what otherwise normal people aspire to guzzle six to eight cups of every day.
So, it's only logical to infer that it's the quest people are addicted to, not the caffeine. However, it is not only a quest but also a status game. The status comes from affecting a greater need for coffee, at the same time as a higher expectation from it, than anyone else. It is socially impossible to gainsay someone's need for a coffee, or their disappointment at pretty much any version of it that is provided.
Starbucks, vast though its sales are, is apparently the last place where anyone with an ounce of self-respect would seek a coffee. I've heard people say that what they serve there "isn't coffee at all" and that "you can't call that coffee". This baffles me. Did they ask for tea?
Tea, of course, is the answer to how to cope with coffee. It can be made to a high standard without a large and noisy machine and we British enslaved a subcontinent to ensure our supplies of it. It is no exaggeration to call coffee-drinking a slight to the efforts of the hundreds of millions who toiled under the yoke of the Raj. The only downside with tea is that decent tea is genuinely unobtainable in any other country, and indeed in Starbucks. One of the many things that makes me well up with hate is when someone gives you, instead of a tea, a cup of tepid water with distant memories of having been boiled - and a tea bag on the side. As if they have no idea what you might use the tea bag for or where to put it.
"Many people," they are implying, "like to pop the bag under their tongue while sipping the lukewarm water." No, they don't. When I order something in a café, I expect more than the ingredients. It's like asking for a bacon sandwich and being chucked a bag of Sunblest and a pig.
One last word on coffee: the only form that I have ever genuinely enjoyed it in is when it's heavily sweetened and served in a wine glass with cream floating on top. Whether or not this also contains whisky, these warm little mini-Guinnessalikes are the most fun sort of food and, if Starbucks did them, I'd forgive that company all the shit that I imagine they've brought down on wherever the hell in the world coffee comes from anyway.
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