According to excerpts from Out of the Blue, the cursed biography of Liz Truss by Harry Cole and The Spectator’s James Heale, Truss is dependent on two things for comfort: Instagram and espresso. On a trade delegation to New Zealand, she’d ‘had so much coffee and just wasn’t interested in meeting the ambassador’.
Coffee is from Ethiopia. Its origins as a foodstuff are murky, but the best legend is about a goatherd called Kaldi who in the mid-9th century noticed that his goats ate black beans and became manic and sleepless: essentially, they started dancing. From there, coffee spread to Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Persia.
But when coffee met Christianity there was the moral panic that reliably comes when a powerful new stimulant is found. It was called ‘the bitter invention of Satan’. Venetian clergy condemned it – they were more emotionally dependent on religious-themed portraiture, to be fair – but Pope Clement VIII (1536-1605) liked it, and it took over from wine and beer.
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