For the Love of Beans...

I fill a saucepan with water and set about looking for matches. There's no time for anything fancy today. Everything dumped into one big mug is how I'll have to have my coffee. I begin to tear open a sachet of dairy creamer. Something makes me pause midway.

It has been a while, hasn't it, since I had black coffee?

Black coffee. For a person who thinks in terms of pictures, there can't possibly be a more powerful stimulus to the imagination. The last three months of twelfth grade, I woke up to a steaming mug of black coffee every day. My aversion to milk was the stuff doctors' (and mothers') nightmares are made of. So mornings found me hunched at my desk, reading or doing the daily crossword, black coffee at my elbow. Months later, the beverage was to become a habit an addiction. If I didn't know this then, the kick I got out of sniffing at my mug every morning should have given me a hint.

The water begins to bubble. A quiet, familiar, comforting hum.

This is a sound I would know anywhere, this low humming of water being brought to a boil. It used to echo over the staircase in Allnutt South when I went to use the hot plate to make coffee in the middle of the night, or at two in the morning, when the entire block was silent. Coffee calmed me down, cheered me up, was the perfect accompaniment to Systems or Policy, made Micro II bearable, and was the best company I could ask for on breezy, rainy evenings, when all I wanted to do was to sit on the ledge of the verandah and stare at the sky.

The water bubbles louder, more insistently.

It makes me think, for some reason, of the rich, bitter black coffee in the white ceramic pots that sat on our breakfast tables in the College mess. If that didn't wake one up for an 8:40, nothing could. Because the marmalade was both sweet and tart in a way only marmalade can be, it accentuated the bitterness and strength of the coffee that I washed my toast down with. And I know I can tell that coffee apart from a million other brews any day.

There's something warm and homely about a good, old-fashioned cup of coffee made the traditional way, I think to myself as I take the pan off the flame.

The process of making it is as therapeutic as the beverage itself. Not that the 30-second method - set water to boil, empty sachet of instant coffee into mug, take now-boiling water and pour into mug, enjoy! - is a bad substitute. Vending machines - now those seemed like an insult to coffee.

An outrage, I thought, till I found myself employed 10 hours a day researching M&A transactions. Looking back, I realise I owe my sanity to the 8 cups of espresso I helped myself to from the dispenser in the pantry every day. I breakfasted on espresso practically every morning for about 10 months. It isn't the healthiest lifestyle option, but I was too young and always too hassled to know any better. By the time I left the place, though, I'd kicked the habit, coming down to two cups a day, refusing to allow myself to depend on anything that badly in the long run.

It's been a while, but the smell of espresso still automatically triggers a small attack of nerves - will I finish all that work before noon? Is that report error-free? Why isn't this godforsaken transaction making any sense to me?...you get the drift. :) And black coffee and economics are married to each other in my imagination; through eight years of association, and of one accompanying the other, I now instinctively think of demand curves, inflation and development (in that order) each time I smell black coffee. I suppose it will remain like this for a while, if not for the rest of my life. Truth be told, I hope it will.

I tear open my sachet of Nescafe, smiling at the memory of a kindred soul from College, whom I share a love of coffee, economics, EcoSoc, books and Asterix (among several other things :) with.

Ruch insists that Bru makes for better black coffee than Nescafe does. The coffee table in D-8 was always piled with ribbons of bright green, and the occupant of the room always more than willing to make giant mugs of soothing black coffee for friends going cross-eyed over the Phillips curve or Public Finance.

I stir the instant coffee into the water, all these images in my head coalescing into one glorious, earthy ripple as the smooth brown powder dissolves into a mugful of the best thing in the world.

The dairy creamer doesn't belong here. :)