It’s hard to pin point exactly when my love affair with coffee began. We certainly had a few clumsy flirtations in my youth. I remember asking for coffee at my paternal grandmother’s house (but I didn’t really like it at that point, I just wanted to be grown up), she was horrified and said in shocked tones: “You’re far too young to be drinking coffee!” Then, in my early teens, my two best friends, who were sisters, used to drink Nescafe. I don’t think I really liked it that much then either. Once, when I was car sick after coming back along the winding coastal road from Campbletown to Carradale, where they lived, one of them suggested that I’d feel better if I lay down with a cup of Nescafe. It didn’t work.
The irresistible taste and smell of real coffee first caught my attention when my elder sisters and I went out to Nico’s one Sunday with their flatmate and their flatmate’s boyfriend who was 24. They were all students by that time and living in a flat in the west end of Glasgow near the University. I was in third year at secondary school and thought it very grown up and glamorous indeed, to be going into town for coffee. I enjoyed hanging out with them, it seemed to me that they led such exciting lives, always experiencing new things before me and now they were even living away from home. It was impossible then to imagine that I would ever have the courage or ability to be a student, read all those books and write essays with my own opinions. I still imagine that they must know so much more than me about life and everything, even though it’s really only a few years that separate us.
Later on, when I was a student at Art School, I would spend many a boozy evening in Nico’s, but my first memory of it is on that rainy Sunday afternoon. We sat in the front section, at one of the marble- topped tables. I was on a chair facing the leather bench that ran along the wall under the gilded frames and mirrors; it was all light and gold and glitz. The sisters’ friend’s boyfriend asked me a question about what I was studying, I remember blushing and replying in muffled tones that I was still at school. I think he sensed my embarrassment and didn’t subject me any further to the obvious discomfort I felt at having to speak in public. I remember I thought him very kind; and quite handsome too. We had a cafétière, I hadn’t seen one before, and I watched as my sister capably lowered the brass coloured plunger into the glass jug and the hot liquid flushed through the filter, filling the air with the unmistakable smell of freshly made coffee. She told me you had to be careful when you did that because once, a friend of hers had pushed the plunger in too quickly and the scalding hot coffee had exploded up out of the cafétière and burnt the friend’s hand and splashed on her face. To this day I remember that warning every time I use a cafetière. I guess my sister would be happy to know that she has saved me a few inevitable burns over the years: I am a little accident prone after all.
