It was Eddie Izzard who observed that being invited in for a cup of coffee after a date was a sure sign that you would not be getting a cup of coffee, but that sex was likely. He also warned that there were exceptions to the rule; if the President of Burundi invites you in for coffee then don’t take that as an indication that horizontal activities will follow shortly. The strategy has never worked for me. I did try inviting a young lady back to my abode but it turned out she didn’t drink coffee. And as far as I could ascertain, neither was she to be tempted by tea, wine, beer or an assortment of cocktails. Finally I was reduced to the prospect of offering a slightly chilled glass of water, or sex. This was a proposition too far and we parted, never to meet again. But I do like coffee.
During my previous life I was limited to the offerings of the mighty machine that sat in the corridor with a myriad buttons offering a plethora of choices. It didn’t actually matter which button you chose, the result was always a tepid, murky brown, mess. It never quite tasted like coffee, or tea, or chocolate; depending on which button you had pressed. It was dire but I drank gallons of the stuff, more as a form of therapy than refreshment. Drinking endless coffee is more managerially acceptable than sucking your thumb and weeping openly (trust me, I tested this).
As retirement approached I planned my coffee perfumed future and invested in a coffee machine. I did not want some impersonal electronic box which would spew forth liquid upon command. I wanted involvement, I wanted a relationship, I wanted challenge. I wanted a La Pavoni lever-action coffee machine (with optional cat).
The La Pavoni is what a coffee machine should look like. If it turned up for casting for a Martin Scorcese movie set in a New York coffee house in the Italian quarter, it would get star billing and a chance to have a love scene with Angelina Jolie. It looks gorgeous and when you turn it on it sounds gorgeous. It makes real coffee machine hissing and fizzing noises which provide a sense of impending danger in the kitchen; as if you are mere seconds away from a major explosion (although this only rarely becomes a reality). Sadly, as with so many beautiful things, the beauty is only skin deep. The chrome peacock (for that is her name) is a real bitch when it comes to actually producing drinkable coffee.
The instructions are simple enough. Grind some beans and stick the ground coffee in the holder. Squash the grounds so they are firm in the holder (this is know as tamping) and then attach the holder to the machine. Lift up the lever and then pull it down to push water through the grounds and into the cup. Serve it to The Godfather and immediately be offered the hand of his daughter in marriage. But of course it is not that simple. Grind the beans too coarsely, or apply insufficient tamping, and the water will flow past the beans with scarcely a pause to collect some flavour along the way; and the result will both look and taste like well-used dishwater. Grind too fine or tamp so hard you create a solid brick of coffee bean, and you will not be able to pull down the lever at all. Result, no coffee in the cup and a red face. Striking the correct grind/tamp balance takes weeks of trial and error and thousands of baht worth of coffee (apply your own currency conversion).
Once you have drinkable coffee flowing, you can move on to the milk challenge. How do you stick the steaming wand device into a jug of cold milk and end up with hot milk and frothy foam. I had no idea, and the output from a sizeable herd of cows was wasted in my attempts at a cappuccino. Drastic action was called for, so I dated the manager of a local coffee shop. She had the secret and shared it with me. It only seemed reasonable to marry her.
So, for the last three years or so my La Pavoni has hissed and threatened, and delivered hundreds of cups of wonderful coffee with accompanying milk delights. My wife has also hissed and threatened, but she is delightful too. But then, two days ago when I went to turn the machine on, the switch responded by spewing itself across the table in a shower of spite and small components. I was devastated, how would I obtain my daily caffeine fix? Attempts to reconstruct the switch were futile, and I couldn’t get inside the beast to play with the wiring because it needed a special tool forged in the fires of Vesuvius and fashioned between the thighs of Italian virgins (which is a slightly more poetic way of saying that I did not have the appropriate screwdriver). I went to bed and slept little, a key component of my daily life was threatened.
Of course this is Thailand where you can get everything if you know where to look. I started looking at an outlet which claimed to support La Pavoni devices, but they mocked me for owning such a manual machine and turfed me out. So the next step was to embark upon a hunt in the lower shelves of all the dusty electrical shops which occupy the back lanes of this haphazardly planned metropolis. Finally I found something that looked suitable and I rushed home to try it out. A few false starts with wires plugged into the wrong place, but then the hissing started and I pranced around the kitchen singing “it’s alive, it’s alive.” And it was, and all is well with my world again. When you don’t have the affairs of some insignificant company keeping you stressed and awake at night, you have to find something to fret about occasionally. All it takes is a broken plug. Still, if the President of Burundi pops round for a quick one, he is really going to enjoy my cappuccino.
Comments 🔗
2012-03-24| Grant saysOoh, a new blog. Must be about coffee machines. That’s interesting. Wonder how long it will last? Mmm, I’d give it at least four years. I think I’ll check back in on 24/3/2012 and see if he ever got the La Pavoni fixed, or his special tool back out of the thighs of the Italian virgins…
2012-03-24| Jock saysHappy Birthday Pattaya Days. Actually coffee was the subject of one of the best chat up lines ever to come out of a fair maiden´s mouth ´Coffee, Tea or ME´
Unfortunately was not aimed at me but one of the other members of the infamous Hash House Harriers … SHE was of Scandinavian origin and did not have a ´hash handle´ at the time. The membership got wind of this and she has been known as ´Coffee, Tea or ME´ for the last 20 years …