- 4

i remember: coffee.

i love coffee. i would go as far as to say i am addicted to it. luckily for me i do not have to get my fix from a strange dude who cuts my dowe and egberts with birds coffee no i can get my drug of choice pure from any supermarket or coffee shop in the country. life is good.

a day isn’t a good day until i have had a cup of joe, and frankly i am not at my best until i have had at least two.

i can remember where the addiction took hold of me.
it was when i was working at the bbc. no i wasn’t anyone famous or important at the bbc. i was a humble kitchen porter. so i spent my days fetching and washing the cups and plates the great and the good of the bbc used.

it was a summer job; my dad got it for me. i can’t remember what it was he was doing there, but i am sure it was a variation of doorman, a career he took on in the last years of his life. with a word in the right ear i was employed. while not quite worked to the bone in a dickensian way it was bloody hard. the lunchtime traffic at the beeb was huge and the lunch hour was more like three.
so there i was either running between tables getting the finished plates off the tables or i was elbow deep in hot water scrubbing to make the crockery fit for use again.

true the job had it’s compensations: good money (i was a student, so i didn’t pay tax on my earnings), free food (always a bonus) and lots of lovely ladies to look at (i even made a total fool of myself over some lovely posh blonde – oh well at least i got to use my sixth form poetry skills on her…)

most importantly it was here i discovered coffee.
while i was having my lunch (normally fresh thickly cut turkey on still warm fresh made rolls) i was introduced to coffee: black and strong.
even better it was free and on tap.
now i am the first to admit i am a bit of a pig, and in this case i was and i wolfed (see that – clever huh!) the coffee down. cups and cups of it.
lovely jubbly.

it took me a couple of weeks to realise why i wasn’t sleeping as much as i used to, but by then i was hooked.
years later i am still drinking far too much coffee, it no longer keeps me awake. coffee has sustained me through long nights when i have been revising for exams. i have had times when i have had a detox from coffee. i become even more grouchy than normal, but it is worth it for the taste of that first cup once i go back on to the java.

for the population of the uk the bbc is an important institution it helps educate, it helps inform and it entertains. if you needed one reason to be proud to be british then the bbc could make a strong claim to be top of the list.

for me it was where i fell in love with coffee. it’s one of the few love affairs that has last.