Head to Head does coffee

This week’s topic: That coffee should not be consumed after dark

Andrew Woodhouse
I may have short black running through my veins but I know coffee should only be served after dinner in tiny cups or with breakfast at a proper stand-up Quartier Latin Parisienne café bar.

Coffee in corrugated cardboard cups or in finger-burning glass mugs without handles are definitely not de rigueur.

Coffee is not a drink: it’s always been a religion. Sanctified at least 1,000 years ago for spiritual reasons when Muslim monks cultivated beans to make communion wine, it was then prohibited by Muslims in the 16th century and put on trial charged with being a heretical substance. Verdict: guilty. Banned by Turkish Sultans in the 1800s for political reasons and later associated with rebellions in Europe, it arrived in Europe via Venice in the 1600s.

I gorged on a whipped flambeau coffee in the Art Nouveau Grand Europa Hotel, Prague, coffee shop where Kafka drank and where the velvet revolution was plotted. Outside in Wenceslas Square, heritage-listed trams trundled by with bullet holes preserved from the 1956 rebellion and Cointreau coffee was served for breakfast by staff speaking in thick Drrac-u-lah accents.

Coffee somehow attracts anarchy and should not be sold or drunk unsupervised after dark.

I blame it all on Khalid, the Arab boy goatherder who first noticed, according to legend, goats were more lively after eating coffee beans. Intrigued, he boiled the berries, producing coffee.

In 1583, Dr Rauwolf from Germany [where else with a name like that?], spent 10 years in Persia and defined coffee as “a beverage black as ink, useful against illnesses, particularly those of the stomach.” Quite frankly, Herr Doktor, after ten years I’d have expected a D.Phil.(Oxon) thesis rather than this one-line summary.
And yes, decaffinated coffee, coffee without the coffee, is an oxymoron and effective as ‘alcohol-free zone’ signs in Kings Cross: useless.

Coffee is a drug. So I want a government-owned caffeine injecting centre – medically supervised of course – with security guards, research studies, Institute of Criminology data and NSW University reports all proving it enhances the area with no adverse local economic impacts.

That’s fair by me.

Peter Whitehead
My pregonzo co-columnist hit this week’s nail squarely on the head [surely shome mishtake – ed.] last week when he larded his Chicken Little chirpings about beauty sleep deprivation with some pertinent facts: “We need 7–9 hours sleep. Sleep debt increases stress, anxiety, irritability, memory loss, accident rates, bi-polar disorder and heart attacks”.

And now that I think of it… slowly… maybe watching the Melbourne Footy Show was not the best use of my hours after midnight [only half as valuable as the hours before] – my mind might be more thingy if I got more nigh-nighs.

But enough weary what-iffing. What of those much higher in the Great Chain of Being, those Masters of the Universe who plunged us into the Global Financial Crisis? It was not only class-A drugs keeping them buzzing in front of their Boomtime computers. Those addlepated spendthrifts were crazy on coffee [or cola or energy drinks or any of the flimsy disguises of the Devil’s dark drink].

Three centuries back the South Sea Bubble swelled out of the over-caffeinated confusion of London’s coffee houses. Last century America’s Prohibition Laws forced otherwise sane decision makers to the black brew and the world fell into the Great Depression. Any beverage that makes you talk faster than you think is bad for business.

Adults should be free to sate their appetites as they please. But only when sane.
Enjoy your Java as a morning pick-me-up. Wake up and smell the coffee. But do not exhibit symptoms of brain damage by taking stimulants before bedtime. Early to bed and early to rise cannot make you healthy, wealthy or wise when too many beans have been imbibed.

Look around a modern workplace – all those Jon English eyes sunk deep in screen-demented sockets. Help these people, they can be saved. Serve them herbal teas and calming potions. A glass of milk, unpolluted, no dregs to be drained.

Daylight hours are the efficient time to be working: dawn to dusk Adam delved and Eve span. The setting sun is a sure sign to rest, not to brew tomorrow’s ruin.