perfunctory

‘It was the search for televised cricket that took me into the Porter Bar in suburban Edinburgh on a Saturday lunchtime, and possibly the funniest incident I have witnessed while watching broadcast sport.

The Celtic v Rangers match was on, playing to an audience of enthusiastic Celtic fans, one of whom took to jumping on the table and

jabbing the screen with his finger at any outrage he felt the Rangers players had committed, accompanied by imprecations containing our two best known four-letter words, used as verb, noun, adjective, and adverb.

Thus Rodriguez was dubbed ‘a little f***ing Dago bastard f**k,’ and worse; Prso was told to ‘get the f**k away back to Croatia and feed your f***ing family,’ and various other players in blue were given similar treatment, with the choleric fan showing an almost uncanny knowledge of their provenance, and the appropriate racial slur for the occasion.

This continued unabated until the referee booked Celtic’s Senegalese defender Camara, at which the fan leapt up and spluttered at the referee, utterly without irony: ‘Get away to f**k, you wee racist c**t.’

I only drink coffee once a year. To do so I must travel to Celebes and build rapport with the locals, seeking out a different village every time in order to preserve some semblance of authenticity. Coffee is not to be taken lightly, after all. Once the village has accepted me I ask them where I might find the palm civets in that area. Armed only with my equipment and mind, I take to the jungle and scour the floor for their characteristic droppings. The next week generally consists of locating excreted coffee berries that have passed through the civets’ beautiful digestive systems.

Once enough partially-digested coffee berries have been located, the brewing process begins. This is very similar to the way coffee is normally brewed (the exotic locale and stellar beans being somewhat out of the ordinary):

First, the ripe beans are cleaned and washed by hand with boiled water from a pristine local spring. It may take a while before a fitting source is located - an inappropriate balance of trace minerals can harm the taste. After this customary cleansing comes the familiar ritual of roasting. I will not go into details here because I trust most of you are familiar with this step. The process is somewhat more complex in a jungle environment, but as always dedication, roast profile and individual skill are the most important factors.

Following the roast and subsequent cool, I like to take around two hours to contemplate the history of coffee and the impact it has had on human society. I find this meditative step is necessary to fully understand and enjoy coffee. Most people neglect to do this, resulting in an intellectually-impoverished, incomplete experience. As soon as I have arrived at the correct mental state I hand-grind the beans in a purpose-built, multi-stage grinder. This is a crucial step that requires a level of concentration and skill that is wholly alien to most - speed, coarseness and throughput volume all affect the end result and the slightest error can ruin a batch completely.

Near the end stages of grinding there is a self-evident need to multi-task. I boil around ten cups of water and rinse out my insulated French press nine times. The final cup is left to cool for around half a minute (depending on ambient temperature) while I place the ground coffee in the press. With cool anticipation, I then poor the water on the coffee and stir briefly so as to ensure a perfect mix. I let it steep then, resting my weary mind and enjoying the aroma that lazily drifts up from the maturing brew. Having settled and developed, the coffee is finally strained and poured into a bone china cup.

All is now in place. As I sit down in my hand-carved chair of ivory and teak, pausing to pick up my cup and put my feet on a kneeling servant’s back, I am generally overcome with my own awesomeness. It is only fitting. Then, in a fleeting instant, I have the first taste. Sadly but inevitably, it is a moment uniquely indescribable to mere mortals. As heavenly music drifts through the warm air the sun shines down on me - and me alone. The taste is so perfect that it sends shivers down the spine of every man, woman and child in a radius of 1500 km. Illnesses are cured, ancient friendships rekindled and generational fueds abruptly ended, all in the blink of an eye.

Naturally, I do not expect you all to understand this. The preparations involved in making a single cup take about a month, but the sense of superiority lasts throughout the year. The taste is superior to any coffee any of you will ever pour into your boorish, uncultured mouths.

From here