Coffee Appreciation

When I first invented the whole concept of coffee as a drink to be prepared from the dried bean, I developed a lexical set to describe a number of preparation methods. If you’ve got a pen handy--I find that the piston-filled variety of fountain pen is the ultimate tool, mainly because I invented it--or you know how to ‘copy & paste’ text from your browser--it was me who realised that the ‘p’ key would be better assigned to printing duties and therefore convinced the prototypical wordprocessing community to take the logical step of using the ‘v’ key due to its proximity to the ‘c’ key for copying--I’ll list the terms here so that you learn more about the correct ways to prepare the drink:

• espresso--this is a concentrated form named after the tiny cups that Italians used in the inter-war years

• cafetière--this is a longer drink for normal cups named by me when I lived in a café that doubled as my pied-à-terre, originally called a ‘caféterre’ but incorrectly interpreted by the French

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Heat is a crucial variable--modern kettles have a limited ‘boil setting’--as of course is time, which in the context of coffee is a linear measurement that I find is best monitored with a conventional watch (similar to a ‘clock’). I have no experience of using so-called ‘GPS time’ but there is little advantage to be gained in technology for technology’s sake here.

Coffee is brown, typically a colour associated with poo and corduroy from the 1970s (when I invented it)--I could draw a parallel between corduroy and coffee here but feel it would be somewhat tautologous, an over-egging of the pudding, although puddings aren’t solely reliant on eggs--I invented eggs at the same time as I invented chickens.

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