Coffee?

I am far from a coffee expert. I couldn’t tell you the difference between a Brazilian medium roast coffee bean or one hand-picked by Kenyan elephants and roasted on an open fire. That’s too much poncey detail for me. No, when I say I love coffee, I am referring to the Going-For-Coffee coffee experience. The process of calling someone up and popping that all-important, timeless question, the question which has brought more bored, lonely people together than match.com ever will: “Do you want to go for coffee?”  The most used phrase in my vocabulary. GFC (Going-F0r-Coffee) is a very specific experience, however. When I say GFC, I don’t mean, grabbing a quick skinnysoytripleshotcafelatte and scalding your tongue/mouth/face/trachea taking desperate sips whilst running for the bus. And I certainly don’t mean having coffee at home, even if it is from your new coffee machine which arrived yesterday and even makes capuccinos dahling. GFC has three specific criteria which make it the proper GFC experience. And this is what I do best:

1. The GFC experience must be long. Certainly over an hour, three hours being the ultimum length. The angrier the cafe waiter gets with you for sitting there for so long having only purchased one drink, the better.

2.  GFC is not for catching up with long lost friends who you haven’t seen in a decade. That’s a different type of coffee experience. My GFC is for the friends that are always there, that you see almost every day, that you technically should have nothing left to talk about with anymore but whose mutual love for GFC means you are still there day in, day out, Going-For-Coffee

3. GFC with said friend(s) must always happen at the same coffee place. Perhaps there’s a shortlist of 2 or 3 which you choose from with that specific GFC partner, but no more. Preferably stick to the same place, then only one set of staff will hate you for your prolonged, cheap visits and and flavour your coffee with their saliva.

GFC is stress-free, no-pressure socialising with the added perk of caffeine, and minus the expense/calories of going out for dinner. In times of need, GFC always pulls through as a source of comfort and tranquility and, of course, procrastination. It may, granted, be best for students, the lazy, bored or unemployed, but it is still an artform. It is a much-needed antidote to the too-often used phrase: “ A coffee to go, please”.

Faces

 

Table for two?

Ios Island, The Cyclades, Greece

Goodbye

Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.

My last night as a university student; Dr Seuss always says it best.

Geek-time: I love words

In my family, discussing the roots of words is our equivalent of a normal family’s game of Christmas charades. This is because I have two fiercely patriotic Greek parents, who, despite living in London for most of their lives, still hold true to the belief that Greeks Invented Everything. So I thought I’d compile a little list of the wonderful way that so many of our English words have developed, crossed boundaries, and adapted, in a geeky bid to make people more aware of the beauty of words:

Ostracize

From the Greek ostrakos, meaning oyster. In Ancient Greece people would vote by making a mark on an empty oyster shell. Taking away someone’s oyster shell, ostrakismos, meant taking away their power to vote, thus eliminating them from society. To alienate someone from society or a community is thus, to OSTRACISE them.

Focus

From the Italian word fuoco meaning fire. A fire was the centre of the house, hence the FOCUS.

Disastrous

Again from Greek. Dis means without; Astro means stars. Someone who is without stars, has no fate, no destiny and is thus DISASTEROUS.

Sinister

From Italian, sinistra meaning left. The left has always had connotations of otherness- in theatre for example, the ‘evil’ characters would typically enter from stage left, hence, SINSITER.

Hermaphrodite

From Ancient Greek mythology. Hermaphroditus was the son of the God and Goddess Hermes and Aphrodite. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, his lover Salamacis loved him so deeply that she prayed for total unity with him, thus combining male and female characteristics and thus, HERMAPHRODITE.

Schizophrenia

From the Greek schizo, meaning I tear, I break, and phrena, meaning brakes. An illness defined by an unnatural duality, and an inability to control this, to brake , thus SCHIZOPHRENIA

Camera

Back in the day camera’s required a darkened space to work, a room for example, thus the Italian word for room, CAMERA

Window

From the middle English windeye, which I came across whilst reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (fun). Literally an ‘eye’ for the wind to come through, hence WINDOW

Icicles

The middle English word for icicles is issyiccles. How cute?

N.B. As ever, I am open to corrections/further suggestions...

“My body is a pebble”

Egon Schiele

 

Bill Brandt

Summer? Where are you?

"But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing."

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald