Several years ago, I found myself at an airport, planning to travel as I usually do. I decided to enjoy a good cup of joe to accompany the weather before the delay in my flight was announced. I cheerfully approached the café stand where a small line was formed, consisting of about two or three individuals.
I didn’t anticipate this causing much of an inconvenience, as the process appeared quite straightforward – simply pour the coffee from the pot, a swift squirt of milk, exchange of cash and I’d be on my way.
However, it turned into a scene straight out of a Shakespearean tragedy! Ahead of me, noises of grinding and stirring filled the air. A young woman stood beside a massive machine that reminded me of the complex mechanics assorted in the Wizard of Oz movie. Puffs of steam escaped from concealed vents of the apparatus as another person pressed or stamped a brown substance into a small opening on the side. There were levers and sticks being manipulated, buttons being pressed, knobs being turned, all executed with precise movements and angular turns. And all this production for a mere cup of coffee! It was hardly worth the hassle. As time wore on, I wasn’t exactly fuming, but I did pivot and purchase a bottle of water instead.
At one point in time, preparing a cup of coffee was a straightforward task. You gently remove Irel from the jar, scoop it thrice into the cup, pour in boiling water and seize the day. Instant coffee followed suit, similar process but in a granular form, almost just as satisfying. But that was before the coffee purists invaded, not a singular group, but hordes of them.
In all honesty, I don’t desire to wrestle with inexhaustible options just to have a simple cup of coffee. There’s an overabundance of choices; from various forms of lattes, to cappuccinos sans the Franciscino or Dominicano variants, lungos, frappés, and nitros that appear to be almost sinister, and red and black eyes minus weed or half-eye. Furthermore, there is that abhorrent thing they’ve named Americano, owing to the regular Italian coffee being excessively necessary to the punctilious soldiers amidst their southerly expedition.
Usually, I feel no empathy for oppressors and purveyors of dictatorship and suppression. However, it’s in these situations I realise why Ottoman Soudán Murad IV outlawed coffee, holding the belief that its consumption fostered rebelliousness and covert activity in the dens where it was sold. His propensity to impose the death penalty on anyone with coffee on their breath might have been overly harsh, but there was a certain creative flair to his methods of retribution. One such method entailed sewing the miscreant into a leather sack and flinging them into the Bhosparus, momentarily impacting the tourism sector while simultaneously bolstering fishing.
Similar spy networks of England’s Charles II hovered around coffee establishments thinking they might be hotbeds for the propagation of ‘trumped up stories’.
I don’t advocate any wrongdoing; I am emphatically anti-fascist and it’s not that I’m wholly intolerant or impatient. All I am saying is I’d much rather not waste a lengthy five minutes on a task that could reasonably be done in a swift five seconds. And that, in essence, is my point.