Coffee times

Drink up the coffee. Mmm it's good on a Monday morning, just enough down me to perk me up and just enough left in the pot to give me something to look forward to, the taste is good. I try to cut down, not because of health reasons but because it's just a crutch. The crutches are no good. They become heavier after a while and start to weigh me down. But Monday mornings are hard to stomach without a good coffee.

I got into coffee at a young age, I remember actually wanting to be hooked on it for some weird reason, wanting to need it in order to function. I blame Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks because he loved a cup of black coffee and he seemed to get all the girls flocking round him with out even trying. So at school aged about 15 I would sit in a gloomy little break room on my own with a strong instant coffee pretending I was enjoying the taste, trying to be different.

I didn't really enjoy it and nobody paid any attention to me. I probably only tried to be a moody caffeine fiend a couple of times, but these strange little memories seem more vivid than what happened in most lessons. Except the time Richie Richardson set fire to the chemistry lab and nicked off to leave Mr Kunzer to put it out.

I remember seeing Kunz through the window as we all peered in after the lesson. He was getting the fire extinguisher and squirting it out with an intense sort of calmness. I always felt sorry for Mr Kunzer because he forgot how to write ages before when his wife died in a car crash and he had a mental breakdown. He wrote all wonky as if he was using the wrong hand. And he was a soft touch too, he had no control.

I always liked Kunz so I had no qualms the next day when he asked the class who started the fire. Everyone kept quiet as school boys do when they've been asked to snitch. Richie Robinson was off on a plane on an early school holiday or something, and had done the stunt as an end of term dare, an attempt to impress the more popular kids. I didn't like that he'd done that to poor old Kunz. So I spoke up in the silence.

Richie Robinson did it.

And that was that, I never really liked him anyway. I'd broken the classroom code but I knew I'd done right. That was the Agent Cooper coming out. All in a day's work.

In the late nineties I would sit in central Manchester with my oldest friend Alec in what was to become Starbucks, it was called the Seattle Coffee Club back then and as a coffee shop was quite a novel thing we felt pretty sophisticated sitting by the window, lounging along the breakfast bars sipping enormous americanos, looking at all the swanky Mancs walk down the posh shopping street. We enjoyed some pretty ruthless people watching, sniggering and mimicking and imagining conversations and imposing personalities onto every character that passed.

Sometimes we'd have two coffees and by the time we'd leave we were so wired on caffeine that we'd have to stop in the Moon Under Water for a pint, just to take the edge off before we got the 192 back to Longsight. Thems were the days.

A few years ago I was forced to take a temp job that I knew I'd hate. It was some sort of project support for an over-enthusiastic American woman called Carrie who worked at G4 Security -the much hated and badly managed security company who messed up at the Olympic games just two months before I worked there.

They were in the process of being taken to court by the government for breach of contract or something.

I didn't care about the job or anything about G4S, all I wanted was to be presented with a mundane task, so I could just daydream the hours away, not sit around feigning enthusiasm having to 'brain storm' ideas about the 'bigger picture'. It made my toes curl so much they almost fell off.

I hated that job. It was like going to double maths. One morning I was in such a bad mood walking along Victoria street to the office that I got into an argument with the fruit seller who was pitched out side.

He wanted a quid for a pair of battered old pears. I offered him 50p because they were all brown and soft but he was rude and I told him his fruit was rotten and some words were exchanged. I'm not very good at arguing. So I just went up stairs and did the same thing I did every morning which was go into the tea room and make a really strong cheap instant coffee with warm water so I could neck it in one go. Not because I wanted to perk myself up for a day's work, just to give me some sort of comfort, some emotional crutch to endure the drudgery of life.

And now it's Monday morning and I have to face the rush hour, the commuter train, the teeming pavements of central London and my hum drum 9-5 existence.

I can't give up coffee, it's my only hope.