Tuesday 13th September   

I realise that I have become addicted to Starbucks; by addicted of course, I do not mean that I cannot live without it, but rather, I find myself ending up in a Starbucks most days.  I love those tall silky-milky lattes they do; it’s as simple as that.

As a child I was never given coffee, I cannot be sure if Grandma or my mother ever secretly drank coffee when I wasn’t around, but I doubt it – tea was the chosen beverage in our house.  When, on the rare occasion, we ate out, tea was always ordered for me, and, like all children of my generation, I hardly understood the concept of choice, or if there were a choice that I had the power to exercise it. You ate or drank what was prepared or ordered for you; the only choice you understood was that if you refused it, you would go without.  Not such a bad lesson actually, and one today’s generation of spoilt infants with their petty likes and dislikes, and tantrums when they don’t get what they want, might benefit from learning.  It was only when I started working, and the innocuous question “tea or coffee?” that I realised that I had never tasted coffee.  I found it quite bitter at first and could only drink it with the addition of at least two spoonfuls of sugar, but I fairly quickly got used to it, and would then naturally reply “Oh coffee, black, no sugar, please.”  I always liked my coffee black, and as I got older, the stronger the better.  In Tuscany we used to percolate our coffee on the hob, in an aluminium two cylinder percolator, and then later I got a real espresso machine which I became quite adept at manipulating, and Edward and I would drink quite a few espresso’s a day.

But now I drink smooth milky lattes, with just a sprinkling of vanilla and cinnamon, I seem to have developed a taste for them.  Almost every day if I am out I end up in a Starbucks and have one.  The only thing that rankles is their infuriating habit of calling a medium size, a “grande”.  Even more ridiculous is that they insist on calling the smallest size they do a “tall”. Come on now, that is plain daft.  So I always ask for a medium, and when they reply “a grande latte?”, I say sweetly “no, a medium latte, as I requested, thank-you.”

I know I will never win, but then again, neither will they.