In my new office, coffee is user-pays.  And fair enough, I guess I'm not in the private sector now.  There’s one of those modern machines in the kitchen and everyone buys their own capsules.  Now, I’m not going to name the brand, because they don’t need the extra marketing, but it is one of those behemoths who can afford major movies stars to do their publicity (Mr Clooney, I’m looking at you). 

But the capsules are proprietary, and aren’t sold in supermarkets.  So this afternoon I cycled over to one of their stores, in a very posh part of Paris, a side street near Au Bon Marché.  The queue stretched out the door, making it impossible to see anything – probably to sit down and have a coffee, I thought.  I excuse-me’d my way through the crowd and found a bit of room in front of a counter.  I got a brief glimpse of the floor-to-ceiling dark wood shelves and the staff wearing suits, before a particularly large suit came over and said “Madame, the queue starts there”, indicating the door. 

“To buy coffee?” I said.  Yes, this was the case – elegant Parisians, who should have known better, were queueing patiently, 30 deep, to pay their money at the counter, and then take their ticket over to an elegant staff member, who would then reverently put the little space-age capsules in a designer bag. 

I looked at him and said “C’est un peu n’importe quoi, n’est pas?” (Loose translation – What the hell do you think you're playing at?). But I didn’t wait for an answer.  A wave of indignation swept over me – I had better things to do with my Saturday afternoon, damnit!  So I excuse-me’d my way out, a little more impatiently this time. 

Citizens of Paris unite!  I know you aren’t served the best coffee ever here, but that’s no reason to sell your soul to the multinational corporations.  Decent coffee is a democratic right, not something that should see you queueing into the streets in winter like a Soviet-style food shortage.

Have decided to take my plunger into the office and make my own coffee, in a one-woman protest at the raging pretension surrounding this new wave of coffee machines.  I even have an antique coffee grinder, so I may go all old-school and start buying my own beans (Fair Trade for extra points).  However, I think what offends me the most is not the aggressive marketing or the fact that the machines remove all freedom of choice about what brand of coffee you consume.  No, it’s the fact that the aforementioned coffee just isn’t that good! 

I remember Paul Thomas showing the way drinking midnight-black espresso in Roasters in the early 1990s.  I remember drinking flat whites with Ben in Atomic on a Saturday morning in the early 2000s (yes, I now regret my fixation with lattes, and I recognize that flat whites are the one true coffee).  I remember the smell of roasting coffee in a friends’ kitchen in Devonport.  More recently, I have learnt to order a café crème when I want a milky coffee, and I have grown to love drinking noisettes (short black with a dash of hot milk) for a quick fix.  And all of these are many times better than the liquid produced by one of these capsules. 

But this blog has a happy ending, because ten minutes later, wandering the streets in a daze, my feet led me inside a little hole-in-the-wall where I had the best coffee I’ve had since I arrived in Paris.  Lili’s Coffee, on rue de Dragon (!), is an American-style coffee bar, but it seems they’ve been to Italy too… I was in cappuccino heaven.