The second time I lost my virginity was at a classy hotel near The Barbican in London, with a hot red-headed woman called Dee who I’d met on the Internet about 15 years ago. I thought I knew it all, but it took this one special woman to open my eyes to a whole new sensual outlook on the world. It’s almost like a veil had lifted on the lies I thought I’d been told all my life and underneath it all turned out to be true – every rumour, cliché and meme. And she did it without so much as straying a toe over to my side of the bed we shared one night due to a slight booking error at a mutual friend’s hen do. In fact, all Dee did was buy me my first ever proper coffee the morning after as we shared breakfast together in the hotel’s café with the gang, post hen night.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d drunk coffee before. In fact I’d lived on coffee and Pot Noodles throughout several stressful periods of my life where sleep and time were sparse and work deadlines were looming. But I’d only ever had the instant stuff. And only because I had to stay awake and only ever under the duress of desperation/exhaustion. My entire life I thought coffee tasted like bitter uckslush, and tea like dirty water, and anyone who chose to drink either one voluntarily for anything other than caffeination purposes was a) mad, b) weird, c) mad and weird, and d) lying to themselves on some level that this was a good thing to do. I have literally spent the last 45 years of my life believing this 100%.
I’m also almost anally squeamish of anything that other people develop addictions to. Of course, hypocritically, I’ve had plenty of my own addictions :- food, Facebook, Netflix, *spoons with smiley faces on them. But I secretly, smugly judge other people for their addictions because I’m a mean-spirited old crone in that way (I pretend not to be, but I can’t help it, there are few other ‘fun’ perks to living such a sensible life).
I think some part of me thought that the rest of the British population’s obsession with sipping or slurping insipid, bitter hot water 5 times a day whilst muttering ‘Ooh lovely,’ ‘Ooh that’s better’, ‘Ooh that’s a lovely cuppa,’ was just pathetic and all a big fat lie. You all reminded me of the chimps in the PG Tips Tea adverts of the 70s the way you sucked the filthy liquid through puckered Trump-mouths making blowing noises between sickly swallows. I’m sorry world. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. I’m sorry I thought you were just making an excuse to slack off work and procrastinate for 5-10 minutes over and over again the way smokers do. (I’m not sorry to smokers, you guys still suck).
So back at that nice hotel with Dee, I was a bit knackered after the hen-activities of the previous night, and said I should make a coffee in our room. Facilities are provided for doing exactly that. It’s part of what you pay for. Even though I hate tea and coffee I make a point of taking all the provided tea and coffee from any hotel room I stay in precisely because I HAVE paid for said bilge water and someone who visits my house one day might want to drink that shit. But Dee was there with her outstretched hand of concern as she commanded me to ‘Stop!!! Don’t drink that crap! I will buy you a PROPER COFFEE with breakfast.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’, I said, (we are the sort of friends who can speak this bluntly to one another and still remain on each other’s Christmas list), ‘This coffee is FREE. Why should one PAY for coffee (which as we all know is disgusting and only there to help us wake up)?’
Dee was insistent. I thought she was bonkers, quite frankly, but I was too tired to argue with the aforementioned hot red head the night after a hen do, even if it had been a very tranquil, relaxing and refined affair involving theatre tickets (‘Kinky Boots’ in case you were wondering), a nice dinner and lights out by 11:45pm. I’m 45, people, not 20! I’m in bed by 9:30pm most nights watching Netflix and eating something I shouldn’t with a happy-faced spoon, so that WAS a late, wild night for me. Don’t judge me for being feeble, or I’ll judge you right back. And I’ve had more practice.
So I acquiesced to Dee’s wish that I drink PROPER coffee and not the ‘packet of dirt’ she described as coming free with the room. I thought I’d humour her. But as it turns out, after 45 years the joke has been on me the whole time.
Dee ordered me an Americano, and knowing I don’t drink cow’s milk any more since my Amchara days, she got them to put Oat Milk in it. I’ve not had oat milk before, only soya milk (devil’s sweat), rice milk (what I kind of imagine cat’s milk to taste like with sugar added), coconut milk (fine if you like Bounty Bars), almond milk (my usual choice…you learn to tolerate it) or hazelnut milk (you think it’s nice at first and then it starts to make you feel a bit sick like that time you ate the entire box of Ferrero Rocher by yourself. And when I say ‘you’ I mean me, obviously). So I had pretty low expectations of the whole affair really – oat milk made me think of hippies knitting their underwear from lentil husks (do lentils have husks? Actually…how do lentils grow and what do they look like before they end up in packets? That’s a random thought for another time…).
BUT I WAS WRONG.
I say that in capital letters, dear reader, because I know it will shock you too. I’ve steered you through many new experiences in vivid detail that you’ll never be able to burn from your brains in the name of being open to the strange wonders of the unexplored world – from DNA tests to sound healing and enemas (in fact it’s weird to think I had freshly ground coffee up my bum before I had it in my mouth). But here I lay before you my closed-mindedness in all its barren, grim realness and admit that I completely and utterly got it wrong.
I sat next to Dee with my big artisan cup of freshly ground/brewed coffee expecting nothing but the usual disappointment/caffeine hit – almost like someone who has sex just to get a baby and resents every single squelchy second. And I took my first hit of the real thing.
What?!!!
That was the first word that came into my head. I sipped again…
‘WHAT?!!!!’
What the hell was this? This creamy, nutty, roasty-toastiness making love to my tongue and nostrils like a saucy angel of pure delight. This was not coffee! This was NOT coffee. My mind didn’t compute. My poor little fuddled brain tried in vain to search all previous categories of hot beverages for what this was, but it came back blank.
‘Bloody hell, Dee! Oh my God!’
I can’t *actually* remember what I said to her and the other people on the table that day. I think it was probably something like that orgasm scene in ‘When Harry Met Sally’ except I wasn’t faking the pleasure noises. I felt my eyelids go all limp and my eyeballs go all fluttery like a baby drunk on breast milk or a teenager who has just been royally snogged by someone extremely handsome and athletic. I was vaguely aware of the girls laughing at me for having made it this far into my life without proper coffee.
I could not believe what I was tasting. The feeling in my mouth was *divine*. ‘I could REALLY get into this’, I said, ‘I could really get into THIS,’ I repeated, starting to sound like a complete and utter pervert as I rocked back and forth in my chair, clutching the handcrafted PROPER china mug in my little mits like I was sipping from some satanic Grail equivalent. How could this be coffee? It tasted nothing like the stuff I’d had at home. NOTHING.
Dee looked happy. She had instigated what can only be described as my very late deflowering of the caffeinated kind. I remember a similarly smug expression on the face of the friend who bought me my very first vibrator (I was also pretty late to the party with that one). The face of womanly wisdom, handed along like a baton of knowing. It was like I’d joined the biggest secret society in the world. And it had been hiding in plain sight the whole time.
It was at this point, I think, that we got a second cup of coffee. I say, ‘I think,’ because much like a lot of other bad behaviour involving addictive substances, I was a little bit high and the details of quantity got a bit fuzzy. All I remember was that I needed to go to the loo very suddenly. I remembered my boyfriend mentioning the post-coffee-poo being a thing. It all started to make sense.
The hotel toilet was a bit of a trek along a corridor and round a bend and after I’d done my business I was hot-footing it back to the café to join my friends and finish my coffee when I realised I was walking like the woman in the Prancercise video. More of a gentle goat-gallop than a walk really, whilst swinging my arms with little enthusiastic bent up elbows and almost forgetting I had knee joints as I skipped along the corridor like a young Forrest Gump high on sugar. I suddenly realised that I was well and truly off my tits on those naughty beans! THIS is what people have been talking about all these years! All those little cartoons where people say things like ‘Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee’ or stuff like that….SUDDENLY I realised it was ALL TRUE. I felt so…perky and…like…well…such an idiot. But also angry. ANGRY, because I had stupidly deprived myself of this feeling, this perky twerky skippy sensation first thing in the morning. All these years I’ve just said, ‘I’m not a morning person,’ and scheduled every appointment, every business meeting until waaayy after 11pm so my brain could catch up with my body. I have dragged myself through the first half of the day like a slug tied to a bowling ball for 45 years without realising there was an alternative. I thought everybody felt like this.
‘I could have been twice as productive my ENTIRE LIFE!’ I practically shouted at Dee. ‘Why did no one tell me?’ ‘Why didn’t I listen?’ ‘Why, why why didn’t I know?’
I could have produced twice as much work in my adult life and been a millionaire by now. No really, I could have. Anything that can get me to prance with snappy elbows at 8:15am with a smile on my face is literally a miracle potion that could have helped me conquer the known universe, invent cures for all diseases before elevenses, and still have time to watch Netflix whilst eating Greek yoghurt with a happy-faced spoon before I’d even normally be starting my working day.
I felt cheated.
I felt bitter. Bitter like the shitty stale instant coffee I’d been forcing myself to have on rare occasion for medicinal necessity instead of this divine ambrosia-like nectar of seductive creamy roastiness.
But lovely Dee was comforting and soothing to my confused and shell-shocked soul, and told me more about it all – like how the coffee was really good because it was *freshly ground* and that makes a big difference, and how much fun I could have trying out lots of different coffees. And I started to feel better again, and hopeful that I could do a LOT more work in the second half of my life, and I needed to practice not being so cynical when other people tell me something is good. Although I draw the line at jazz music and pink wafer biscuits. There have to be some limits.
And like any newly deflowered virgin, once I’d got over the shock of what had just happened, and got over wishing I’d done it *years* ago, I felt very glad that even at the ripe old age of 45 that there were still plenty of new and sensual life experiences waiting to surprise me. Even if some of them make me walk a bit funny afterwards.
