JUST HAD TO BE SHARED ☕️ Buying a fucking coffee has become unnecessarily complicated. There was a time when you walked into a café and asked for a coffee. That was it. "Coffee please." Somebody put coffee in a cup, you gave them some money, and everybody got on with their fucking day. Not anymore. Now you walk into somewhere like Costa and ordering a coffee feels like you're filling out a mortgage application. "What would you like?" Coffee. "Americano, latte, cappuccino, flat white, cortado, mocha, macchiato, espresso, double espresso, iced latte, iced Americano, frappe?" Fucking hell. I don't know. The brown one that wakes me up. Then comes the size. Small, medium, large, regular, tall, grande, massive, fucking oil drum. I'll have a large. Excellent. Surely we're finished. Oh no. "What milk would you like?" Milk. "Whole, semi skimmed, skimmed, oat, almond, coconut, soya?" Cow. Just whatever normally comes out of a fucking cow. Then they start offering you syrups. Vanilla, caramel, hazelnut, salted caramel, gingerbread, cinnamon, chocolate, white chocolate, pumpkin spice, sugar free vanilla, sugar free caramel. No. I wanted a coffee. I didn't come in to design a fucking Yankee Candle. But we're still nowhere near finished. Would I like an extra shot? Decaf? Half caf? An extra hot one? Skinny? Whipped cream? Cold foam? Chocolate sprinkles? Cinnamon dust? Caramel drizzle? Chocolate drizzle? Ice? Crushed ice? Less ice? More ice? At this point I'm expecting them to ask whether I'd like fucking underfloor heating installed. And there's always somebody in front of you who knows this system intimately. "Can I have a large iced skinny oat milk caramel latte, half sweet, extra hot, two pumps of vanilla, one pump of hazelnut, no foam, extra shot, light ice, whipped cream, caramel drizzle?" Fucking hell, Barbara. You're not ordering a drink. You're giving the launch sequence for a fucking nuclear submarine. Meanwhile I'm standing behind her thinking, "Coffee. Milk. Two sugars. Please let me go home." Then comes the price. "That'll be five pounds eighty please." FIVE POUNDS EIGHTY? For a fucking coffee? For that money I want to keep the mug. In fact, I want shares in the fucking building. And because you've already stood there answering twenty seven questions about milk and syrup, you just tap your card like you've developed Stockholm syndrome. Then they finally hand it over. And I've ordered the biggest fucking size they've got because, naturally, I'm thinking bigger cup means more coffee. Silly me. The cup's the size of a fucking paint tin, but about fourteen percent of it appears to be coffee. The rest is milk, foam, whipped cream, syrup, ice, chocolate dust, caramel drizzle and whatever other fucking building materials they've used to construct it. You've basically ordered a coffee and they've built a fucking extension on top of it. If you've gone for one of the cold ones it's even worse. You pick up this enormous plastic cup thinking you've got enough caffeine to see you through until Thursday, then realise three quarters of the bastard is ice. Six quid for twelve ice cubes, a splash of milk and a frightened little espresso hiding at the bottom. Take the ice out and your "large" coffee would fit in a fucking egg cup. And then there's the whipped cream. Fucking mountains of it. You've got to eat your way through half of the Alps before you even reach the beverage you actually ordered. By the time you finally locate the coffee, you've consumed eight hundred calories and you've got cream on your nose. At that point it's not a drink anymore. It's a fucking dessert with a caffeine problem. And somehow we've all just accepted this. We've gone from putting the kettle on and spooning Nescafé into a mug to standing in a queue while somebody called Tyler asks what fucking personality we'd like our milk to have. I don't need my coffee to be an experience. I don't need it handcrafted. I don't need it drizzled. I don't need it dusted. I don't need it topped with something that looks like insulation foam. I just want it hot, strong and capable of making me slightly less likely to tell everyone to fuck off before nine o'clock in the morning. It's coffee. Put it in a cup. Give it to me. And stop making me take a fucking GCSE before I'm allowed to drink it.