Holy Medusa

Coffee by Chris Phillips of Flavours of Lakhoum, 175 Swan Street, Richmond.
Photo: Rebecca Hallas pinched from The Age


This post is fuelled by caffeine. My usually drug free body is zinging. My brain feels like it is attempting to repackage itself in a rhomboid shaped cranium.

I love coffee.

I hate coffee.

I used to romance my cup of roasted goodness in bed, on those leisurely mornings when demands of the day were less pressing. I would sip and read, or write inspired thoughts. Coffee was my friend. If I courted her with a little care, keeping her to just one a day our relationship remained easy.

Most years I would take a little holiday from my addiction. Just to prove I could. It started in London in the 80’s where the coffee was almost uniformly crap, strange brown liquid out of suspicious looking urns. I found some beans and a grinder in my adopted home in Stoke Newington, only later to discover they were kept for the sole use of not sipping with pleasure, but sluicing out the intestines as an enema! That crystallised to me the relationship Brits had with coffee at the time.

So a couple of years ago in my annual ‘I can give up caffeine’ drive, I extended it longer and longer, til I no longer missed her.

That’s when the problems started and my friend turned into an unpredictable foe. Just one cup could now make me shaky. A sip or two too many could rearrange the contents of my head, squeeze it, make it hurt. But most of all – fill me with unease.

Sometimes its ok and I get that sweet pleasure I so fondly remember. But those times are getting rare.

I miss her. Want her back. But realise that sadly this is a relationship I have out grown. But sometimes, on mornings like this, nostalgia gets the best of me and I fire up the kettle, grind the organic beans and make the tiniest little plunger full. I sit and take a deep sip and wait and see where the journey will take me.