National Coffee Day

 National Coffee Day.

Now you may find this hard to believe but today is the one day you've all been looking forward to. You may not have known it at the time but this is a day designed to take it nice and easy. It was always thus on a Sunday for as long as any of us care to remember. So put the kettle on, open up the Sunday Times with its volumes and chapters of pages, magazines the size of a country estate and then just reflect on whatever may have taken place in your life this week, this month or even a year and just relax.

It may have occurred to you that this may or may not be your sabbath day so it's time to abandon ourselves to everything and anything that may give us enormous enjoyment and satisfaction because you deserve it. You've committed yourselves to your busy, workaday schedules, dropped the kids off at school, jumped into the car, parked the car at a railway station and then headed off to our offices, shops or wherever our employment may take us. You know the score so you carry out your arduous tasks with the minimum fuss and efficiency hoping against hope that nothing vitally important has slipped our memory.

By Sunday morning of course all you want to do is just boil the kettle, pouring the requisite number of drops of water into your mug of coffee and quite possibly switch on the radio for a morning of Jazz FM, Magic Soul, Heart Radio, Smooth Radio, Boom Radio or Classic FM. The said radio stations may not necessarily be your particular preference but coffee and easy listening music may slow down your hectic pace of life, remove the urgency and just allow Sunday to wash over you.

Today Ladies and Gentlemen, we are reliably informed by our sources, is National Coffee Day. It's true you know. Here we are at the beginning of October and, with Harvest Festival and Succot on our current agenda, today may be the ideal opportunity to take a break and contemplate the one drink in our lives or maybe the second that gives us an instant stimulus as soon as we take a gulp of it at any time of the day. Yes folks it's National Coffee Day so sit down by your kitchen table, flip open the biscuit tin and gently pour milk and water onto a small group of coffee beans. Some of us refer to coffee as the perfect alternative to the national favourite that may be tea but coffee has that strong aroma of wondrous caffeine that we can't resist.

The history of coffee has been well documented and we're all aware of those Caribbean coffee plantations that Britain first discovered many centuries ago and then found to be irresistible during the 1950s. In London's Soho, coffee bars simply proliferated by the dozen. There was  white coffee, black coffee, espresso, cappuccino, even bars that may just have served hot milk with a hint of coffee. It was the age of the constantly melodious juke boxes with innumerable homages to Bill Hayley and the Comets and rock and roll. There were steaming urns of coffee ready to go, boys and girls jiving to their hearts content and general merriment.

Coffee has been celebrated and recognised in every part of the world but one country can't get enough of this caffeine fix. It is the ultimate antidote to a stressful day, sipping that unmistakable fragrance that leaves us feeling rested and at ease with ourselves. In the USA coffee has been mentioned so frequently on American prime time shows that it's also become second nature. It isn't quite an addiction or obsession but the Americans do love a coffee with several boxes of doughnuts. In cop and comedy programmes, coffee is a vital necessity since nothing can be that essential that we have to drink it all the time. But give the USA its coffee and doughnuts and they're deliriously happy.

In the long running, much loved and now sadly no more TV classic, Friends, coffee became the central feature of everything that mattered in the general functioning of everyday life. The memorable Joey, Matt Le Blanc, Jennifer Aniston- Rachel, Lisa Kudrow, Phoebe, Matthew Perry, Chandler and David Schwimmer, Ross, all stole the hearts of a global audience with some of the most magnificent comedy sketches in the recent history of the sitcom. But Perks, the coffee bar where the whole gang used to hang out, joke incessantly, fall in love, then tease each other flirtatiously, was the one place where coffee always seemed to be on tap.

Here in Britain the sudden emergence of the high street coffee shop is now clearly in its pomp, almost  dominating the beverage landscape. There's Cafe Nero, Pret A Manger, Starbucks and of course Costa which tends to be exactly what it says on the tin so to speak. The abundance of coffee shops of course comes  at the most expensive cost. In fact a cup of coffee is so extortionately dear that you may have to take out your life savings the next time you next go in one. Coffee comes in a whole variety of guises ranging from, as mentioned above, the cappuccino, the skinny latte, latte, the mocha with a slight dusting of chocolate, espresso and any conceivable variation on a theme.

Most of us grab a cup of coffee as we race into the above coffee empires, sprinting towards our destination, drinking and gulping in a frantic hurry and then realising that we still had plenty of time anyway. Some of us drink coffee as if it were going out of fashion as opposed to tea. It's almost like some familiar balancing act between work and relaxation. But we do like to think that coffee will settle our nerves before important assignments, just at that early morning moment when a shot of caffeine sets up very nicely for the rest of the day. So everybody it's time to wind down, chill out, smell the coffee beans and remain calm. We'll have an organic coffee for good measure with plenty of milk.