Coffee break

I gave up coffee a couple of weeks ago. I won’t pretend it was easy. The physical withdrawal began with a blinding headache accompanied by creeping nausea. My limbs turned rubbery, and I was reminded of when Winston Churchill cruelly compared Ramsay MacDonald to a Barnum’s Circus freak dubbed ‘The Boneless Wonder’. I felt just like The Boneless Wonder, but with my head trapped in a vice. This feeling lasted for more than a week. I could have fixed it with a single, swift flat white, but I chose not to. This time, coffee and I are over.

I can’t remember exactly when I became so addicted to coffee. It crept up on me, like it did on the rest of the country. As a child, from the age of four, I drank tea, little steaming cups that punctuated all the parts of the day not spent in school. There was a whole language to tea.