I used to like caffeine. A lot. My coffee habit was legendary in both its scale, and its lack of discernment. Tea, I rarely touched. It was just too damn soft. Then, three months ago, after a week’s abstinence (due to being on holiday, and having better things to spend my money on than milk – i.e. ouzo), I discovered upon resumption of caffeinated-beverage consumption, that I had suddenly developed a sensitivity to my former drug of third choice. Before this, I would have put caffeine down as more necessary to my functioning than nicotine. I could have imagined myself giving up cigarettes, but not coffee.
When the caffeine thing first came on, I was in denial for a while, trying to convince myself that it was psychosomatic. But it wasn’t, so I gave up coffee and switched to tea. Lots of tea. I became one of those ‘tea’ people that I had formerly so despised. People who refer to “a nice cup of tea”, and say such dreadful things as “Ooh, I’m gasping for a cuppa” as though they’ve just stepped off the set of 1960s Coronation Street. Tea always seemed to me the drink of somebody who was too much of a lightweight to hold their coffee. I wouldn’t go into a pub and order a shandy, so why boil the kettle and make tea?
Well, as though being punished for my hubristic dismissal of these tea-quaffers, I was forced to become one. After a few weeks, I could no longer drink even tea, having to switch to decaffeinated, since there is no way in the world I was going to be one of those hot-chocolate-in-the-daytime drinking adults. They might as well just suck it out of a spouty cup. So I hang my head, my former fellow coffee addicts (and I mean addicts, not people who think it’s cute to call themselves addicts), and bid farewell to the lovely world of sluggish matinal need, followed by the slurp of sweet, milky joy in a giant mug. Sigh.
I have many fond coffee memories. Among the best, reading between classes at Keele University, with a latte from Vite n’ Eat. Or arriving at a seminar at 9 o’clock, with a flask and a mug (a mug that I actually used to keep in one of the teaching buildings, in some sort of bizarre display of territoriality), and pouring that levels-sustaining sixth cup of the day. The coffee-milk concoction I used to take to work at the MMU, just so I could get some extra caffeine in my system when there wasn’t time for a hot drink. So many memories. Which sets me thinking about my reason behind pondering the subject in the first place. It’s a straightforward one...my mother tried to poison me with regular tea. She swears that she didn’t, but I am not someone who has ever been susceptible to the placebo effect. I read once about an experiment, in which students were given fake-alcoholic drinks, and began to behave as though they were really getting drunk. This is understandable on one level. If in a pub full of drunkards when sober, one behaves differently than when in a station waiting room. Alcohol-induced joie de vivre is slightly infectious. But give me a weak gin and tonic, and I’ll damn well tell you about it. Upon visiting Tunisia, a country with strict licensing laws, I found that ordering beer brings one either real or fake beer, depending upon the establishment. They don’t tell you, but it’s very, very obvious which is which. Because one has an alcoholic effect on you, and the other doesn’t.
But back to tea. Yes, my mother tried to poison me. Inadvertently, I’m sure; it’s easy to get the tea bags mixed up between their containers and the cups. But the result was that I was reminded of exactly why I had quit one of my greatest simple pleasures. Many people overdo it with the caffeine occasionally, but I had become so hardened to it, that it took at least ten cups of coffee for me to begin feeling a little jittery, or to not quite be able to stop talking. Today, though, I was in this state after only a few gulps of tea. And it wasn’t nice. I found myself unable to stop playing the imaginary piano, and my voice seemed to be coming out of my head without my really having told it to. Even now, I am typing with a very uncharacteristic velocity. The result of the unpleasant side-effects was that I remembered exactly why I no longer imbibe grown-up hot beverages, and that I swore never to do it again.
However, every time I drink alcohol, I also suffer from unpleasant side-effects. So why don’t I, and the populous in general, think better of cracking open that third bottle of sauvignon blanc? Because of delay. Aside from alcohol having a really great upside, as well as a downside, it takes a good few hours for the horrible bit to hit. Usually, with some sleep in between. This seems to trick the brain into not directly associating the two events of drinking and being hung-over. Likewise, a heavy night of smoking may cause a little spluttering of phlegm the next day, but by then you weren’t thinking of lighting up for a good few hours, anyway. The reason it was easy for me to quit caffeine, however beloved it was to me, was the immediacy of the unpleasant effect it had.
And this leads me to positing my theorem of the day. If the government wants people to drink less, it has to work on devising a way to make alcohol have an immediately unpleasant effect, not a delayed one. It takes a few sips of Coke to prevent me from drinking any more of it, but it takes many pints of beer. Maybe pubs could serve only neat Malibu or rum, so as fast as a consumer could consume it, they would vomit it all up again; the added bonus being that, never-ending drinking, without drunkenness, would be good for the economy. Or, if some terrible scientist (I can imagine a Hugo A-go-go type in a secret mountain top lab) could formulate a booze, the consumption of which caused the hangover to develop along with the drunkness, I think people would actually have second thoughts about their desire to drink. And obviously, that’s a better way to encourage moderation than prohibitive price-hikes, or didactic lecturing. Yes. Antabuse in the beer-lines is the way of the future. I’m off down to Ladbroke’s to put money on it right now.
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