LET'S GRAB A COFFEE

Really proud of the choir tonight. They picked up You've Got a Friend very quickly and by the end, it was sounding reasonable for a first run-through. Also, currently the number of people who are in a huff with me is down to a magnificently low: 1, so that's a relief.

I've never understood sulking. What does it achieve? It's like staying at home with the bitter pill you're forcing yourself to drink in order to teach someone you're avoiding, a lesson. If there is a problem with me, the most logical and sensible thing to do is to talk to me about it, surely? I thought I'd made myself as approachable as possible too. Oh well. I'm thicker-skinned about these things than I used to be.

Speaking of being thick-skinned, I had this phone conversation today:

"Matt, really looking forward to our coffee next week."
"It's tomorrow."
"Oh. Yes, so it is. Really looking forward to our coffee tomorrow."

I laughed, but it wasn't funny. It suddenly struck me that neither of us actually drink coffee. He's a tea drinker; so am I. Yet both of us were content to use 'coffee' as a kind of umbrella term for something else - a catchup, a meeting, a whatever. We will indeed catch up over a tea, but somehow that doesn't sound quite right. From tentative first dates to informal job interviews, from mid-morning chinwags to tellings off, "Let's grab a coffee" seems to be the thing to say.

What is it with coffee anyway? Fancy machines in middle-class kitchens, foil bags of beans flown in from South America, frothy milk at the perfect temperature, office workers who can't even say a polite good-morning until they've imbibed a grotty espresso... it's all a bit ridiculous I think.

I know I'm in the minority. A quick walk through the town centre's enough to tell me that; or perhaps the fact that we have a Nestle 3000 (I really ought to find out what its proper name is) replicating coffee next to the vending machine at work. By contrast, we don't even have a teapot in the office - just a jar of PG Tips pyramid bags and a hot water boiler attached to the wall.

Is coffee really that great though? I'm not convinced. Talk about a bitter pill you're forcing yourself to drink! I'd better not take on all you coffee-drinkers on though. There's a lot of you, with your cardboard cups and your bleary-eyed mornings. Maybe one day when I'm a new father or I have some high-powered job that requires my utmost attention in those moments before the sun twinkles above the glassy horizon... maybe then I'll understand it. Until then...

Stick the kettle on.