Coffee Time

I was a latecomer to coffee. I’m British. We drink tea. OK I know lots of Brits drink coffee but I came from a tea drinking family.

We used to use real tea leaves and brew a pot several times a day. We drank it at breakfast, lunch and dinner and various times outside meal times. If someone came over the first thing you did was to put the kettle on for a cup of tea. I actually still do this when Naomi comes over and so does she if I visit her.

Instant coffee was the only type I had ever tried and until I met David, it ran a poor second to tea . David didn’t drink coffee or tea when I met him. He never took to tea except for the short period we were on the Trans Siberian Express. Even David could not resist tea in a cup that looked like Sputnik. He would drink coffee though so that’s what we had, instant coffee.

I was the one that turned him into a coffee drinker. My bad.

Actually I remember the exact time and place where we first had percolated coffee. It was in 1990. Scotland, Fort William, there was a tourist information centre which had a cafe attached. We ordered coffee. The waitress brought us two cups and a plunger. It cost us a pound, or maybe a “poond”. We really liked it and when we returned home to Australia we bought a plunger ourselves.

A favourite coffee place of ours was in Adelaide’s Central Market. A cafe called “Charlies”.  We used to go to the market either on Saturday mornings or after work on a Friday to buy our meat,fresh fruit, vegetables and ground coffee and afterwards we stopped to have a Cappuccino. Sometimes on weekdays if I wasn’t working I went there with my mum too and if David was at the market alone because I was working he’d stop in. The guys that ran the place got to know us by sight and we never needed to tell them what we wanted. If they were busy David would just indicate whether he wanted one or two coffees by holding up a finger or two.

Occasionally during that time we’d go to the city to meet up with some people we knew before going to someone’s house to watch Formula One motor racing on TV. On those occasions we sometimes went bowling first and then went to a cafe which I think was in Goodwood or Unley or some inner suburb for supper where we’d order Vienna coffees and cake. Good times.

Coffee still plays a part in my social life as I meet with friends once a week for coffee at a local cafe.

I do drink it at home too, sometimes tea, sometimes coffee depending on my mood. I still have a plunger, I have had several drip filter machines but they always seem to end up leaking all over the kitchen counter.