Coffee.
This is now the thirteenth day in a row with brilliant sunshine and NO RAIN. When I glanced into the mirror I saw that I had reached that familiar early summer moment when my winter-dulled hair had lightened and skin darkened to become exactly the same colour. An unfortunate choice of beige T-shirt completed the look and a huge weevil was staring back at me. Maybe the interim answer is very heavy eye make-up and definitely no pale clothing.

I then moved on to pondering about the coffee I was holding and how I now buy the riaF edarT brand although it is not the nicest. You can probably tell that I am pretty self-involved and carefree about world problems but when you are staring at thirty different bags of coffee on a supermarket shelf and one is marketed as the choice of any decent person and the others are plainly 'big business' only - then what can you do. My one tiny sacrifice for the general good.

I was also thinking about the way that Britain seems to have abandoned so many of its little traditions and rules about daily living. When you read books like T1m P@rks' autobiographical descriptions of life in Italy, where it is unheard of to have milky coffee after 11.00 am, and compare it to here where just about everyone appears to be on a totally personal eating and drinking regime it is like another, older world. When I was at school in C@mbr1dge one of our annual October amusements was to hang around in the china department of the biggest store and watch the sad, twitchy new undergraduates milling about choosing their teapots. Obviously, for most of them, the first domestic purchase they had ever made and - as it would be used so often and would be constantly on show - a defining signal of their level of coolness. They would stand for hours apparently with their brains spinning out of control, picking up pot after pot. Modern? Retro? Ironic? Aaargh. I can't decide but I can't leave without one - if only my mother was here ...

Now, not only have teapots disappeared from the lives of anyone under thirty but so has tea. Apart from a fashion for milkless Asian or herbal infusions, everyone seems to drink coffee twenty-four hours a day. And at 'tea-time', which has also mostly ceased to exist, it is probably more normal to be topping up your two litres a day water intake. It all adds to that floating, uprooted feeling that so many younger people seem to have but then again my daughter's Italian best girlfriend chooses to live here. 'All those stupid 'rules', who on earth can stand to be told what tiny thing they're meant to be doing every minute? That's why I got out'.
- posted by Iris @ 5/25/2004 10:01:00 AM comment